The Rent’s Too Damned High

A podcast of my Medium column on the long con of asset appreciation.

This week on my podcast, I read my Medium column “The Rent’s Too Damned High,” an essay about the economic incoherence of making home-ownership the path to economic security and a middle-class life.

https://medium.com/p/520f958d5ec5/edit

Obviously, home-ownership does allow for intergenerational wealth accumulation (simply compare the wealth accumulation gap between Black families who were excluded from home subsidies like the GI Bill and white families who weren’t), but that’s not the whole story.

Owning a home is a good way to insulate yourself from a landlord’s whims and a good place to stash gains from the labor market, but when a nation turns to asset appreciation — not labor — to increase prosperity, almost everyone loses within a generation or two.

Without strong labor rights, guaranteed pensions are replaced with a mandate to pump your savings into the stock market casino, where you will always be the sucker at the table. The insufficiency of America’s 401k-based retirement savings is grimly comic.

When workers surrendered employment-based security for asset-based security, we lost the bloc that fought for adequate Social Security and affordable tuition. That means that your parents’ house needs…