It's not. It's just inflation. If I double your salary, but jack the price of everything up 50%, you "got a windfall", but have in real-world dollars earned nothing.
If you own a house worth $100k, but a luxury condo goes up next door full of $600k/each units, and your old house is now "worth" $300k, have you really gotten a windfall?
You still need somewhere to live, the windfall doesn't cover even half the new cost of housing. You could sell it, but there's no where safe for you to land nearby without doubling your mortgage (since your house went up, all nearby ones did too), and paying the extra on your mortgage just to remain housed is a destruction of wealth, not a windfall. You could get a home equity loan out of the new equity, but you'd just have to pay that all back with interest.
It's technically a "windfall" on paper, but it's mostly fake wealth. You are now liable for this "windfall" and owe taxes on it anyway, despite it the fact that it's never physically existed in the real world, and is mostly unusable (except for a few specific scenarios, like cashing out your home to Gentrify some other poorer people out of their homes, in some other different place)
You don't pay extra on your mortgage. A mortgage is a loan to buy the house with the title to the bank as collateral plus some bundling like insurance. Otherwise people wouldn't walk away from "underwater" mortgages.
It may come with inconveniences of linked job changes and relocation but that is a real gain of wealth. The locational value has gone up - which is why they can even afford to "displace".
Assuming that buying a home elsewhere will automatically have comparable price or displacing is also a bad assumption. Despite the rhetoric a single person with a collegd degree in a neighborhood won't cause appreciable rises in real estate value.
It's not. It's just inflation. If I double your salary, but jack the price of everything up 50%, you "got a windfall", but have in real-world dollars earned nothing.
If you own a house worth $100k, but a luxury condo goes up next door full of $600k/each units, and your old house is now "worth" $300k, have you really gotten a windfall?
You still need somewhere to live, the windfall doesn't cover even half the new cost of housing. You could sell it, but there's no where safe for you to land nearby without doubling your mortgage (since your house went up, all nearby ones did too), and paying the extra on your mortgage just to remain housed is a destruction of wealth, not a windfall. You could get a home equity loan out of the new equity, but you'd just have to pay that all back with interest.
It's technically a "windfall" on paper, but it's mostly fake wealth. You are now liable for this "windfall" and owe taxes on it anyway, despite it the fact that it's never physically existed in the real world, and is mostly unusable (except for a few specific scenarios, like cashing out your home to Gentrify some other poorer people out of their homes, in some other different place)