Home Price Depreciation May Push Us To Appreciate More Modest, Less Calculable Rewards

Today's NY Times Real Estate section contains an outstanding piece on some unappreciated consequences as home owners deal with the bursting housing market bubble:

[W]aiting for residential property to increase in worth can be an epic, unpredictable slog .... You start to notice that location and luck are a potent combination. And that in the end, we might be better off thinking of appreciation not in terms of years, but in terms of generations.

I happen to believe this explains why most of us would be happier watching the grass grow over the next few summers than obsessing over our property values.

Judging monetary home value seems less an exact science and more like a fickle game of chance. Thank goodness value is a more profound term than dollar signs denote.