The article, Housing Can’t Be Both Affordable and a Good Investment, raised some good points regarding how polar those two needs are in regards to pricing. San Francisco was used as an example of modest growth on home prices of 2.5% and look at the state of house prices in SF currently! There are very few people who could afford to enter that market.

What solutions could block-chains and smart contracts have on resolving these contrary directives?

Well a few different, tangentially related concepts presented themselves to me immediately. Firstly, there was the idea the there should be some small measure of a landlords equity that should be directed back to the renter for good stewardship (or improvement beyond that contractually required). Those funds could exist not as fixed monies but rather crypto registered against a block-chain. A small amount of the landlord total profit is paid back to tenants in this regard. When the tenant leaves the tenancy the smart contract pays out the escrow crypto as mundane currency. This provides an incentive for the the tenant to keep the tenancy in an excellent state, effect repairs quickly, and generally treat the property as their own investment.

More directly was the idea that smart contracts could be used in the sale of real-estate in such a way that less mundane currency could be paid with a lesser/greater difference remaining as an investment tool that could be bought and sold apart from the real property itself. The investment tool would look like a smart contract that holds a the cash value in cryptocurrency. Growth is periodically: paid out in mundane currency or reinvested in contract. Safety triggers pay the contract back into mundane currency if there devaluation but otherwise the contract block is used for contract fulfillment and smart contract investment tool propagation. The ideal outcome is that new home buyers have the ability to affordably purchase a house in the current market system and the seller can accept that lower price in addition to an investment tool that can be used to continue to build cryptoequity on top of the portion of the non-controlling equity they have in the real-estate owned by the new buyers.

Both ideas would take radical mortgage business regulation and would be variously disruptive depending on how messed up the housing market already is.