housing

All my life I had thought that if you worked hard you would be rewarded. If you worked your ass off, there would be some reward for you. But now I knew that the reward was just the chance to work your ass off.

He had been haunted his whole life by a mildcase of claustrophobia__he vestige of a childhood incident he had never quite overcome.Langdon__ aversion to closed spaces was by no means debilitating, but it had always frustrated him.It manifested itself in subtle ways. He avoided enclosed sports like racquetball or squash, and he hadgladly paid a small fortune for his airy, high-ceilinged Victorian home even though economical facultyhousing was readily available. Langdon had often suspected his attraction to the art world as a youngboy sprang from his love of museums_ wide open spaces.

Americans think New Yorkers are property obsessed, but clearly they haven__ lived a day in Hong Kong. In this part of the world, a man isn__ a man until he is a homeowner. His entire life leads up to the singular moment when he hands over the down-payment check and puts his signature on the triplicate purchase agreement. All the good grades and job promotions he has received are mere preparation; and every source of happiness - marriage, children and retirement - depends on it.

History will see this as the residential commodification era, in which housing provision seemed to lose all contact between supply and demand of housing as a utility and simply focused on supply and demand of investment _ and that is worrying. Investment is good for the economy, but the investment you want is investment that goes into creating homes, workplaces and infrastructure, not investing in owning them and inflating asset prices.

Housing is a human right. There can be no fairness or justice in a society in which some live in homelessness, or in the shadow of that risk, while others cannot even imagine it.