I think one takeaway from the article is that people misunderstand what market movements are good for them when they own a home exactly because they see it as a long investment, while they are actually often still short some proportion of their dream home...
If you want to one day trade down, like in your example, then increasing prices is good.
If you want, instead, to maximize the size of the the house you live in, within a similarly prized area, you should instead hope for a steadily deflating house market - the faster the better, down to a level where you have only just enough equity left to put down a deposit on a larger house.
People often see their house as an investment that will give them a lot of money, while forgetting that they likely dream of trading up, and forgetting that if their house appreciates, the price gap from their house to the their dream house is increasing too.
For most people other than the old, we tend to be perpetually in the situation where we would like to trade up. And so we should cheer on price drops, to a certain extent, rather than cheer on rises in equity.
But in practice people buy houses with heavy leverage (often only 20% down), meaning that price appreciations have the potential to multiply their capital and more than make up for the price gap widening.
If you want to one day trade down, like in your example, then increasing prices is good.
If you want, instead, to maximize the size of the the house you live in, within a similarly prized area, you should instead hope for a steadily deflating house market - the faster the better, down to a level where you have only just enough equity left to put down a deposit on a larger house.
People often see their house as an investment that will give them a lot of money, while forgetting that they likely dream of trading up, and forgetting that if their house appreciates, the price gap from their house to the their dream house is increasing too.
For most people other than the old, we tend to be perpetually in the situation where we would like to trade up. And so we should cheer on price drops, to a certain extent, rather than cheer on rises in equity.