Ant Housing

An article in the NYT this morning:

Housing Fades as a Means to Build Wealth, Analysts Say

By DAVID STREITFELD

Many economists believe that the days of banking on an asset that could only rise in value are gone for good....

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/business/economy/23decline.html

But the question is ... really? Wait, back up. I agree, it was a very strange cultural phenomenon that drove us to believe that housing prices would rise forever. This became in investment strategy to where people stretched themselves over other investments by virtue of the equity in their homes. Now of course they're screwed.

The economists (or this one) say we'll never see a housing market quite like the past 50 years. Another never - will we never learn to never say never? They claim it was an anomaly; we will get back to even earlier ideology that homes were homes to live in, investments in stability, but not the money-makers we used them for.

I'm not convinced. I look around me and you know what I see? Ants. Humans crawling across the planet in unprecedented numbers. Breeding and building our way to an urban mess. Maybe economists don't see houses as land, but if they are I don't agree that land value won't continue to climb. Seems to me people buy houses to have their own space. As the human population grows in numbers private space will be in even greater demand. Prices will follow.

I agree the growth we saw in housing prices was an untenable bubble. We'll see the market recover, but never to the dream-state it was in. An investment in land is unlikely to be a bad one, however.