Why I Am Never Going to Own a Home Again

Guaranteed that responses to this post all based on pre-formed biases and rear-view mirror analysis and group think

starting with your own.

The author of the article sounds like a pompous idiot.

The summation made me blow milk out of my nose.

"...by the way, this is going to sound like a contradiction: but I think housing is a great investment right now. I think housing prices have gone down far enough and I can list the reasons why housing as an abstract investment concept is going to go higher from here. But I don’t like to write about investing on this blog."

where have I heard this before....

Hey, you got chocolate in my peanut butter....

There has to come a time, a length of time... when the Manhattan bears on housing decide the facts are not bearing out their conclusions, and they stop acting like a bunch of Cassandras.

why would you care?

you're making out like a bandit. as a proud owner of a cubicle that is appreciating each and every moment that you manage to stay in it.

you should be celebrating everyone else's profound stupidity and your enormous intelligence and consequent good fortune.

CC gets a woody whenever RS enters the room.

not to mention your consummate wit.

this a residential re site.
What else is there to argue?
I'm sure there is some fashion web site where they argue all day long on the future lenght of a hem.

I say....embrace the argument!
It's way cheaper they therapy and it never gets old!
Imagine a basket ball game where everyone is shirts. That's no fun at all.
We break up into teams, bulls and bears and then...jump ball!
You can change teams anytime you want.
What the heck is bad about that!

then therapy

The author also wrote an article about never sending his kids to college, so I don't think he's an authority on anything.

The anti-rent contingent has a rude awakening coming; nationwide, rents haven't increased substantially in over a decade. There is a lot of catching up to do and it's going to happen in the next 2-3 years.

Here's the Bloomberg article:
http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/content/mar2011/bw20110310_878610.htm

Here's a London article, it's an international issue:
http://www.propertywire.com/news/europe/ray-clancy-201103034995.html

What are you talking about? CPI says rents went up an average of 2-3% annually over the past decade nationwide:

http://www.businessinsider.com/albert-edwards-cpi-forecast-2011-2

Now Manhattan hasn't quite kept up...

i think the main reason this particular person will never again own a home is the long term effects of the very ral psychological trauma he suffered when he lost all his money, beautiful apartment which he mentions often, friends, and oh yeah, there was a wife and kids in there as an afterthought, so they're gone too.
i actually agree with every reason he gives for not sending the younguns to college, except his logical and perfectly reasonable conclusion. modern american college experience if a manufactured extension of adolescence in a society that has pushed back all life's milestone to a much later time, or elimintated completely. and unlike massive crippling debt people might rationalize taking on for a house, the justification for this massive crippling debt exists in a very subjective grey area. but i'm still sending them, although not with loans, but some $ that already exists for their education because they won that proverbial lottery, and what we plan to save.

grad school is another story, we have 2 girls and we always agreed, uh half jokingly, that if the kid is smart, cute, fun, well adjusted - no free grad school. but if it looks like she'll have to fend for herself, we'll need to give her all the tools we can. har har?

the REAL psychological trauma^^^^

What are you talking about? CPI says rents went up an average of 2-3% annually over the past decade nationwide:

Compares well to stocks.

Obvious to all of us, but perhaps not to your average reader - this guy lives in Manhattan where he has rental options of good enough quality. Send this guy to Nassau or Westchester and let's hear about the type of rental he plans to live in to equate to owning.

"Compares well to stocks."

What does that have to do with anything? Needsadvice said that rents have not increased substantially over the past decade nationwide, I corrected her by explaining how CPI shows it up 20-30% since 2001. Miller Samuel puts Manhattan rents dead flat during the same period.

Stocks are up 32% in the last decade with dividends, by the way. I can't really say how that compares to rents since I don't really get the usefulness of comparing the growth of one asset with the yield growth of another. Earnings, on the other hand, are up by an annual rate of 5% or so smoothed out. It seems to me that nationwide rents did as expected (inflation), Manhattan rents underperformed (though arguably coming off a beyond-inflation peak, and not unexpected had I chosen a more smooth window), and stocks did as expected (inflation + GDP growth).