My only point with my post as of late is to bring light to the fact that the people who are most angry are those who missed the boat.
Maybe for some, but I think you’re wrong about the majority of us, and even framing the issue this way shows how wrong you are. The point is, there is no boat! Nothing happened between 2002 and 2005 to change the fundamentals of how residential real estate works. No law of man or nature says that anyone who didn’t buy a house before 2003 will forever pay rent to someone who did. For reasons discussed endlessly on this blog and others, the real estate market got badly distorted for a little while there, and now we’re just waiting for it to get back to normal.
As for the anger, I can only speak for myself. I couldn’t buy a house back in the 90’s because I was in grad school. Seemed like a reasonable tradeoff then, and it still does. Next I couldn’t buy a house in 2002 because I was doing a postdoc overseas. Again, a fair tradeoff. Then, once I got a faculty job, I couldn’t buy a house because the markets had gone nuts while a few people made tons of quick cash. Not so fair a tradeoff, really. Pretty irritating, in fact. But I look at it like it was a war or natural disaster or something… for reasons beyond anyone’s control, sometimes things just go against you. But now, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be able to buy a house. Any policy that artificially props up unsustainable housing prices keeps me paying rent and costs me money for no good reason. It benefits a subpart of society at my expense, for no particular public good, and that makes me mad.
(I should say, though, that Bush’s freeze plan doesn’t look like it’ll do much of anything, and so it doesn’t move me one way or the other.)
