On 2/21/11 3:00 PM, [email protected] wrote:
In their study of Boston, Shaky Palaces (Columbia U. Press, 1984), URPE'ers Edel, Sclar, and Luria found that between 1870 and 1970 (a) housing had substantially lower returns than other forms of investment (e.g., stocks) and (b) home ownership in working-class neighborhoods yielded lower rates of return than in affluent neighborhoods.Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2011 13:24:45 -0800 From: Jim Devine <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Pen-l] Home ownership To: "David B. Shemano" <[email protected]>, Progressive Economics <[email protected]> Message-ID: <[email protected]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1David B. Shemano wrote:Anecdotal info from the LA Times: "Homeownership loses its luster: Economic uncertainty, unstable prices and simple math have given Americans less incentive to buy." ? http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-renters-20110219,0,6846786,full.story. ?And they published a Michael Kinsley editorial against rising home prices: ?http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-kinsley-home-prices-20110215,0,5042856.story. ?Maybe there is a chance in my lifetime people will think of housing as a depreciating consumption good and not an appreciating capital investment.<I hope David is right. People should view their homes as consumption goods, not investment goods and especially not speculative commodities. Pen-l alumnus Dean Baker has a good critique of the mystique of homeownership. But then when the US government subsidized first-time home buyers (as an effort to prop up the housing market) he went along and bought a house. He's not a hypocrite: his argument against homeownership (by most people) was based on costs and benefits. Also, Mason Gaffney has an interesting analysis of the Great Recession from a (Henry) Georgest perspective. (Click here.) Implicitly, land values and infrastructure investment play important roles in his analysis. (Marx had some respect for Henry George, although he thought George's analysis was "theoretically ... utterly backward." Click here. Despite this, I say "some respect" because much of Marx's critique is of the "I said that first" or "This is good idea, but only as a temporary solution" variety.) And the big issue, I think, is how the built environment becomes one of the moments of capital, intimately tied up in reproduction costs and the value of labor power, critical use values, realization, the circulation of capital, and finance capital. The built environment becomes fixed, both in the sense that it's literally concrete and in the sense that it stands in a dialectical relationship to a whole institutional structure that can neither abide nor avoid change without crisis. This "fixedness" puts a socially necessary floor on the reproduction costs of labor power, so that what at one moment is a solution to a realization problem becomes in the next moment a source of geographically high labor costs, low profitability, and uncompetitive national/regional capital in the world economy. Marsh --
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Dr. Marshall
Feldman, PhD
Director of Research and Academic Affairs The University of Rhode Island  Contact Information:Kingston: 202 Hart
House
Charles T. Schmidt Labor Research Center The University of Rhode Island 36 Upper College Road Kingston, RI 02881-0815 tel. (401) 874-5953: fax: (401) 874-5511 Providence: Center
for Urban Studies and Research
206E Shepard Building URI Feinstein Providence Campus 80 Washington Street Providence, RI 02903-1819 tel. (401) 277-5218 fax: (401) 277-5464 |
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