I hear advice from the older generation that “buying a house is an investment”. On one level, I get that. Buying a house is a...
I hear advice from the older generation that “buying a house is an investment”.
On one level, I get that. Buying a house is a better way to spend money than renting, because at the end, you have something. You have a whole frigging house.
On another level, I think that the idea that home prices should outpace inflation is insane and maybe has broken modern society.-Andre Cooper, Maybe Treating Housing as an Investment was a Colossal, Society-Shattering Mistake
This entire article is “a-HYUK, why would we expect homes to appreciate when the building’s obviously a depreciating asset? We’ve simply stumbled down a nonsense path that I just realized because I r so smart!”
Because even as the structure depreciates the property claim on the underlying land appreciates because it’s a finite good facing rising demand, dipshit.
This points at the question they really haven’t had to confront since the legal form was established in the 1970s: what are condominiums for?
…they’re for living in?
Are you asking why it is legal to purchase only a partial ownership in land/building, or are you asking why anybody would want to do that?
Well I suppose in the sense of condo towers, like anything built in 1981 Miami or Manhattan seemed like already the maximum units you could put on that site so it didn’t matter if all you ever had was the title to one with no provision for anything else
But like, if you can’t sell the option to redevelop the property what do you have beyond the one we’ve-only-seen-sub-40yo-of-these-buildings-in-America-and-remember-that-one-that-collapsed-in-Florida?
I guess your transferable title gives you one vote towards a condo board that could dispose of the whole property for redevelopment.
The obvious comparison models would be the Central Park co-ops of the pre-condo era and the 99-year ground rents of the European neighborhoods that date from when nobles would sell or mortgage their rural agrarian lands, buy urban lands, develop them, and collect rent as the modern updating of the yearly harvest for a commercial/Industrial society