I've been keeping an eye on home prices in my city (in the US) but it's made me realize that I'll probably never own one. Prices have gone up 20% just in the last year alone because of the pandemic, but that's not much of a change, because housing prices in the US have been increasing since the 1940s. Every ten years the cost of housing goes up by about 25%, which is faster than wages or inflation.

I'm sure this comes as no surprise to the beautiful posters here, because we understand that housing is a commodity in our society, and commodities have to give investors a return on their investments. I think this makes it easy to predict that, since the wealthy people who have the greatest stake in real estate always expect a return on their investments, housing prices will always go up, barring major economic depressions or collapse. It also doesn't help that for a majority of home owners, their house is their largest investment and a bedrock in their retirement plans. This is a neat little trick that the rich have played to get people to defend status quo policies that benefit the wealthy, like what they've done by pushing 401k accounts and eliminating pensions.

I don't have a point other than to vent a little. I don't expect any politician at any level to try and tackle this problem in the foreseeable future. I hate thinking of how many more of us will be under landlord rule, housing insecure, or homeless because capitalists value profit over human life.

Here are the links I was looking at. 1 2