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Comment by euroclydon | Hacker News Reader

Encouraging buying instead of lending discourages a flexible labor market. Basically the government, with the mortgage tax break, is lining the pockets of developers and home builders, and making it difficult or expensive for families to move where there is a higher paying job or even better school district.

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It also encourages boring lives. I recently had occasion to talk with several homeowners.

My plans over the next year? Move to Kerala, learn Kalaripayattu and work on my startup. Several renters had similarly interesting plans.

Every single homeowner (or homeborrower) had plans to remodel some room of their house.

I'm firmly convinced that a home is nothing more than a ball and chain.

[edit: changed 'similar plans' to 'similarly interesting plans'. A reply to this post made me realize it was unclear.]

That's nice, because I'm sure if you talk to 100 renters, most of them also want to move to Asia and start companies.

Sheesh.

I'm a renter and I hit at least one of those points ;) Moving to Asia - not so much!

One had plans to move to north dakota, play guitar and learn to shoot. One planned to follow his job to wherever. Overall, the plans of renters were simply more interesting than those of owners.

Orthogonality is good. If your investments are tightly coupled to your lifestyle, you will have less freedom.

How is learning an ancient form of South Indian martial arts at all relevant to the discussion?

You'll understand after you learn it.

To be fair, despite owning a home, if I really wanted to pack up and move to Asia I could do it. I'd just have sell first and thus do it a few months after you. I'm also pretty sure that a spouse/kids would be much more of an impediment to that move than owning a house.

I live very near to RTP, NC, and only one home has sold in the past six months, so good luck.

I think home ownership is a good aspiration to have.

Just like 'working for yourself' is something a lot of people would like to achieve, 'owning your own home' features on the list.

It's also good for society, giving people more of an incentive to look after their home, their surroundings and to take an active part in society. As well as removing some of the separation of society - land owners, and renters.

Being less likely to move around has its good points as well as bad.

It also encourages nicer neighborhoods, because homeowners are better incented to bond with their neighbors, and the condition of their property isn't an externality to them.

It would be cheaper for the government to throw weekly block parties nationwide than subsidize homeownership to the extent it currently does. (I haven't done the math on that, but you get the point.) Government policies that try to achieve a certain effect via indirect means have all sorts of undesirable side effects. If we want to improve neighborhood cohesion, we should find a more direct way of doing that.

Actually, I have a better idea. Landlords within a neighborhood should band together and give their tenants a share of the appreciation of the property above inflation. Rents would probably have to rise to accommodate this. They should do it as a group because it's far easier to judge the appreciation of a neighborhood compared to a single property that isn't being sold. Once renters have an stake in the quality of the neighborhood, they should act more like owners.

... in theory. But not in fact. Nooooo way.

You clearly have never been part of a homeowner's association, condo association, or property dispute.

I rented for 12 years and then bought twice. I've never had a landlord that I would trust with the best interests of my neighborhood.

Also, I'm sure you can dredge up a whole lot of "approved exterior paint color" drama from homeowners associations, but I'm not as confident you'll find a lot of examples of negligence. Which is what we're talking about.

That could very well be the case: http://www.economist.com/finance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1...

    "Whether stability is such a good thing in a downturn,
    though, is a different matter. A decade ago Andrew Oswald
    of Warwick University argued that owning your own home
    makes you more reluctant to move, so labour markets tend
    to become more rigid as home ownership increases. He
    claimed that increases in the level of home ownership
    (though not necessarily the level itself) are associated
    with rises in unemployment. Ireland, Greece and Spain all
    saw large increases in home ownership in the 1980s and
    1990s, and had relatively high unemployment. America and
    Switzerland had stable ownership rates, and escaped the
    long-term rise in joblessness."

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