Shelter is supposed to be the most basic human need. Four walls, a roof, a place to sleep. But in the modern economy, housing is no longer just shelter. It’s an asset class. A retirement plan. A political battleground. A generational wedge.
That’s why the housing market feels broken. It’s not operating as a market for homes. It’s operating as a market for investments.
The shift started quietly. Mortgage subsidies, tax incentives, zoning laws — all tilted the playing field toward treating homes as assets first, dwellings second. If you bought early, you rode the wave. A modest house became a nest egg. If you bought late, you found yourself priced out by investors and policies that were designed for another era.
The result is a strange duality: people cheer when home values rise, even though it means their children can’t afford one. A house becomes both a point of pride and a source of guilt.
Startups often talk about product–market fit. Housing has the opposite problem: market–product misfit. The product is shelter. The market is speculation.
The symptoms show up everywhere:
Cities where whole generations rent indefinitely.
Suburbs that sprawl endlessly because it’s easier to build out than up.
“Good school districts” priced like luxury goods.
Families treating homes not as places to live, but as chips in a casino.
The irony is that abundance exists — we know how to build more housing. The constraint isn’t technology. It’s politics, zoning, and the collective illusion that scarcity serves our interests.
Like most bubbles, the housing market isn’t sustainable in its current form. But unlike other bubbles, we can’t simply walk away when it pops. We still need shelter. That’s what makes it dangerous: it’s not just numbers on a screen, it’s the ground we live on.
The real fix won’t come from clever financial products or tax breaks. It will come when we remember that a house isn’t just an investment. It’s a home. Until then, the market will keep mistaking speculation for shelter, and generations will keep paying the price.