You're confusing want and need though. You might not like to live in any house, and you might need to be roughly geographically located to do work, but for the most part any house that fits your family is interchangable.
When you take the other things, like job and where you want to send your kids to school it becomes a hell of a lot more fungible.
Given that commoditization is a scale, I would say it could be toward that end of the spectrum if we wanted it to be.
> Given that commoditization is a scale, I would say it could be toward that end of the spectrum if we wanted it to be.
Commoditization is only a scale inasmuch as the underlying goods are fungible. Corn is a commodity because nobody cares about differences between individual kernels, but if some process came around that only worked with super-specific kernels, then you'd be reducing the commoditization of corn.
I can, however, think of nothing that would make housing even close to fungible. Views, neighborhoods, neighbors, noise, history, ___location -- the list of things which are entirely unique per property is higher than basically any other market I can think of.
Those are things you're attaching because of privilege though. One visit to China will give you a view of just how much housing can be commodtized. Endless rows of apartment buildings, each identical, supplying everything you could need.
If you're without a home, one house is very much like another. It's only once you have money and ambition that you might want a better view, better schools.
Treating something as if it's a commodity does not make it a commodity. Treating two things as if they're equivalent does not make them equivalent.
You might say "your right to choose between houses is a privilege", but literally every culture in the world is going to observe differences between two houses, regardless of how they're allocated.
Even considering buildings where every unit has an identical layout, and all residents have access to the exact same amenities, one unit might be closer to the elevator and one unit might be closer to the garbage chute. These are fundamental differences between these units which make them not interchangeable.
> Endless rows of apartment buildings, each identical, supplying everything you could need.
"Providing everything you could need" is not how we define commodities. Fungibility is how we define commodities. One can argue that we should just be thankful with whatever home we get, but trying to act as if they're equivalent is just wrong.
I’ve been to Asia that’s not true at all. Higher floors are more valuable. Views are more valuable. And not even to mention fung shui and the direction doors open.
> If you're without a home, one house is very much like another. It's only once you have money and ambition that you might want a better view, better schools.
Particularly if you're poor, ___location matters a lot.
The very rich will build a mansion in a beautiful but inaccessible area and commute to work by helicopter. The merely rich have the nice cars to get to work. But the poor have no car so need to be either very close or within public transport (mostly nonexistent in the US) to get to that job.
Eh I see your point but I disagree. Look for housing in a highly competitive city, and soon enough you stop caring about geographical specifics and instead look for some combination of useful attributes. In practice, that's fungibility.
This whole thread is filled with similarly absurd statements like this one. That is not “fungibility” at all, not in practice, not in the slightest.
Fungibility is the absolute incontrovertible likeness of two separate units to the point where they are entirely interchangeable across all parties in the economy.
US dollar bills are fungible. Even BTC are not entirely fungible anymore. Houses are not even remotely fungible.
Just because you're willing to accept a wide range of houses does not make them fungible. Each house is unique and each home buyer has different priorities.
That's why houses a priced individually. When you go to the grocery store, they don't individually price each cob of corn. There might be two different buckets with a differentiator (organic vs non organic), but within the bucket each cob is fungible. It doesn't matter which one you grab.
I think gasoline or diesel is a commodity because for the most part a gallon of gasoline is a gallon of gasoline whether you buy it at Shell or at Costco. I mean Shell will probably try to say they have better detergents or whatever but for the most part they are the same.
Similarly, one unit of electricity from solar is the same as a unit of electricity because a kilowatt hour is a kilowatt hour. You could say well my unit of electricity is better because Elon Musk sold it but for the most part they do the same thing.
Housing is not that very interchangeable. For example, in the Denver area in Colorado apparently the Cherry Creek area commands a higher sticker price because of the school district.
Some homes are just more desirable than others. For me, I desire:
* Excellent public transit
* Excellent symmetric high speed fiber optic Internet connection to the home
* Costco or Sam's Club within half an hour or inexpensive grocery stores within walkable distance
And there are unspoken assumptions like somewhere an ambulance can get to me in time if I am dying and take me to a hospital so good roads and proximity to a good hospital.
