> The message of the article is we can't have our "housing values are always increasing" cake and eat our "housing is always affordable" dream too.
Sure you can, as long as you have enough overall economic growth. It won't be a particularly great investment in the sense of growing at a faster pace than the surrounding economy, but it will at least keep pace, and you can live in it meanwhile, and you can borrow money for it, so it's leveraged, unlike most of your investments.
"Net positive" works only as long as it works...until it doesn't.
Overall economic growth may be "real" in the sense that is it growing organically, or it may be a complete fiction based on quantitative easing and manipulated stock prices. It is likely both, but like Bernie Madoff's scheme, the question will be whether you're someone who made a profit during the "good" years or those who took a bath once the scheme unraveled.
The only hard ceiling on real economic growth is Kardashev II at the very least, if not Kardashev III; until then, the material wealth of the human race is either going to continue to grow, or else we will have big enough problems that canned beans and water purification tablets are the only meaningful investments anyway. And those beans and tablets are going to be a lot easier to hold onto if you own a house ;)
That’s brilliant. Can I count you in as a de-anonymized co-founder of the all-important, infinitely-divisible “Strategic Water Purification Tablet Reserves”-backed cryptotoken ICO?
Edit for clarity:
You’re probably right. I thought it would be an apropos time to slip in a blockchain joke. :)
Sure you can, as long as you have enough overall economic growth. It won't be a particularly great investment in the sense of growing at a faster pace than the surrounding economy, but it will at least keep pace, and you can live in it meanwhile, and you can borrow money for it, so it's leveraged, unlike most of your investments.