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Comment by morley | Hacker News Reader

Do you have a source to confirm that the change to mortgage lending caused land prices to double? It seems like the opposite is equally plausible.

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We used to need one parent working, then they changed mortgage lending to incorporate two incomes and surprise: land prices doubled.

I'm not convinced this is as true as a separate issues: many desirable cities and first-tier suburbs have implemented severe land-use controls that force families who want better school districts to pay for housing. This is a point Avent makes in The Gated City (http://www.amazon.com/Gated-City-Kindle-Single-ebook/dp/B005...) and Yglesias makes in The Rent is Too Damn High (http://www.amazon.com/Rent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp/B0...).

I read Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry in the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth but am worried that land-use controls weren't really even on George's radar for obvious reasons; in the 19th C the U.S. was a different place. I don't think the book is bad exactly but much has changed. think the causal issue runs from "land use restriction" -> "higher prices" rather than "dual income" -> "higher prices."

That doesn't sound sensible to me. Land use controls don't force families who want better school districts to pay for housing. It's the differences in schools that make families to seek housing in the most-wanted areas, and most-wanted areas are naturally more expensive.

So, people don't pay for housing or land use, they pay for school district.

Perhaps, in the US, there are indirect ways that land use impacts school quality, but it wouldn't have to be that way.

Yeah, if the school quality is correlated to school financing, and school financing is correlated to property taxes paid, then existing homeowners must have paid a high amount of property taxes to propel their school district into a wealthy one.

Anybody who's overpaying for good school district is chasing home ownership in the area that's expensive to begin with.

Yes: http://www.amazon.com/Progress-Poverty-Industrial-Depression...

Prices are related to available credit. Wages (and rent) have hardly budged but land prices have rocketed.

can't reply to the throwaway dude as HN threading is nuts so replying here.

Low interest rates allows banks to more efficiently financialise housing (that is to say price housing at the optimal point to extract as much economic rent as possible). You get to spread your repayments over a long time and end up paying lots of lovely interest.

Higher rates (and therefore more wage inflation) quickly erodes the debt whilst putting a ceiling on the asset price bounded by wages at the time you sign the mortgage deeds.

The west has been utterly captured by banks. We've seen politicians walk rates down to zero to allow the asset price bubble to continue to extract value from labour.

This is the issue. It's not off-topic for this - all families are working two jobs for the banks.

ps also dude as you are in Canada (so am I):

http://www.greaterfool.ca/

Vancouver is nuts. Calgary: timber

This is going off on a tangent but I think you are spot on. It isn't just two incomes fueling the credit increase but also the insanely low interest rates. I don't think female workforce participation will/should go down, but I wonder if interest rates will ever go up to reasonable levels and pop the real-estate bubble (e.g. in Canada)? I have friends with crappy income situations buying houses for 600K+. I've been trying to hold off for as long as possible but we would really like to plant our roots somewhere (poor immigrant to the Western world so owning land in my new homeland was a dream from childhood). In places like Toronto and Vancouver, buying a home for people of modest means seems financial suicide (perhaps only if you have taken Econ courses). We live in messed up times.

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