Here's an interesting yet flawed analysis of using a house as an investment from the left-leaning CityLab. The piece fails to account for the effects of building equity, pride in home ownership and the lack of rent expense and uses a most unusual city on which to base its claims. Moreover, it does not analyze the risk associated with all investments, as current holders of Apple and Facebook stocks will attest.

Promoting homeownership as an investment strategy is a risky proposition. No financial advisor would recommend going into debt in order to put such a massive part of your savings in any other single financial instrument—and one that, as we learned just a few years ago, carries a great deal of risk.

Even worse, that risk isn’t random: It falls most heavily on low-income, black, and Hispanic buyers, who are given worse mortgage terms, and whose neighborhoods are systematically more likely to see low or even falling home values, with devastating effects on the racial wealth gap.

But let’s put all that aside for a moment. What if housing were a low-risk, can’t-miss bet for growing your personal wealth? What would that world look like?

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