Last week, my colleague Ryan Cooper made the argument that it is time to kill the dream of subsidized universal homeownership, by ending the subsidies that are being funneled toward it. He argued, "The problem is that a house is a crap investment."
Now, the housing market recently turned a corner in the U.S., and has been rising for the past couple years, although those who bought at the peak of the 2006 and 2007 bubble are still often way underwater. But when we strip back to the fundamentals and look at what kind of investment housing actually is, I think Cooper is right.
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