People who are trying to buy a house may or may not want it, but people who currently own who are beneficiaries of this stand to lose a lot if their house lost its value, which they have undoubtedly financially planned around.
It doesn’t help that the move to 401ks from pensions was generally not good for beneficiaries and Social Security is facing a shortfall even before you consider current shenanigans.
> People who are trying to buy a house may or may not want it, but people who currently own who are beneficiaries of this stand to lose a lot if their house lost its value, which they have undoubtedly financially planned around.
So you've given the actual reason here, but now the original description is wrong.
It's not that people want housing to be an investment, it's that people want the housing they already own to remain expensive instead of becoming affordable.
That is, of course, directly in opposition to housing being affordable. But the problem isn't that you need the number to go up, it's that people don't want it to go down. Which isn't a problem if it starts off low and stays there, but is currently a problem because the price is already unsustainably high and needs to go down.
That problem only has one solution and the existing homeowners aren't going to love it.
> It doesn’t help that the move to 401ks from pensions was generally not good for beneficiaries and Social Security is facing a shortfall even before you consider current shenanigans.
People have not been better off for having invested in real estate rather than e.g. stocks:
The Social Security "shortfall" is also entirely fictional in the sense that it has already happened. The Social Security Administration, today, is already paying out more in benefits than it collects in social security taxes. It used to do the opposite, so it gave the extra money to Congress to immediately spend. As a result the government has government bonds on its own books, which is a no-op. Today Social Security sells those bonds to cover the existing shortfall, which is equivalent to deficit spending. Social Security started out by paying benefits to people who never paid in, which is why it will "run out" but is also why the "trust fund" is a sham and nothing magic happens when the bonds run out except that Congress has to pass a law that says "no that's not any good" and change how the accounting works to not be so ridiculous. What they should do is eliminate both the "trust fund" and the social security tax and just fold the program into the general budget with a corresponding adjustment to the general income tax.
It doesn’t help that the move to 401ks from pensions was generally not good for beneficiaries and Social Security is facing a shortfall even before you consider current shenanigans.