Carol Ryan is a "Heard On The Street" columnist for The Wall Street Journal. That is how she is identified in the newspaper. The "Street" to which this designation refers, I am pretty sure, is "Wall Street," not "Main Street." Still, Carol Ryan does seem to be speaking to us, too, we whose lives are not oriented to finance, investments, and making money (as opposed, simply, to doing worthwhile work that, we hope, will provide us with a "living").
The article which introduced me to Carol Ryan, published in the Saturday/Sunday, November 16-17, 2024 edition of The Wall Street Journal, was headlined, as is this blog posting, "No One Can Afford To Sell Their Home." I have just given you the hard copy version of Ryan's headling. Online, presuming you can beat the likely paywall, her article is titled, "America’s Homes Are Piggy Banks That Few People Can Afford to Raid."
The point of Ryan's article, well-described in the online headline, is an important point. More and more, "homes" are not really "dwelling places," but are "investment vehicles." In the world of "investment" - on "Wall Street" as opposed to "Main Street," in other words - human necessities are more and more seen as "investments." Actually, this fact is "a," or maybe "the," primary cause of our "housing crisis." Applying the "Golden Rule," as observed on "Wall Street," we know that those with the gold make the rules. Those with the gold get the goods.
Here is a suggestion, pretty radical, of course. What it we were to reconfigure our laws to eliminate homes as an investment? How could we even do that, should we wish to? Well, if we applied the rule that prevails in Santa Cruz County's affordable housing program, we could provide, by law, that the selling price of a home could never exceed the purchase price of the home, with the addition of an increase in the selling price to reflect inflation since the time of purchase and to reflect any additional investment made in the home since the time of purchase.
I am enough of an attorney to understand that this has Fifth Amendment consequences. There would have to be a tremenous collective investment by the American people to enact a law that would achieve this result I just outlined. It is not constitutional to deprive someone of their property without paying them "just compensation." If we put a legislative "price cap" on the sale of homes, we would probably be reducing the value of assets that were purchased under the earlier system.
Still, think about it. What if homes were priced by "Main Street," not "Wall Street"? Again, it could be done, and I think that we ought to start figuring out how to take the speculation out of home prices, so that everyone has a fair shot at owning a home, and so that "home ownership" is about providing an individual or family with a place to live, and isn't made into an arena for the Private Equity investors who are buying up the country.
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