>As for why home ownership is a good thing, from a societal level, it's pretty well established that home ownership correlates to all sorts of good stuff like w

>As for why home ownership is a good thing, from a societal level, it's pretty well established that home ownership correlates to all sorts of good stuff like wealth development, better schools, lower crime, etc. I'm going to go out on a limb with no data here, but I'm fairly certain you would find the same correlations among people with equivalent wealth of any kind to that of homeowners. Home ownership as a path to wealth building at the societal level is fundamentally in conflict with the (more important imo) goal of affordable housing. This is especially apparent in a democracy... where homeowners tend to wield an enormous (and disproportionate) amount of political power (i.e. see NIMBY). So I would disagree that home ownership is desirable at societal level. Democratic society is better off when the default path to wealth building for the masses involves investing in productive goods (i.e. goods that create economic value.. such as the computer), rather than a good which both is necessary for everyone to live a decent life (though doesn't necessarily need to be owned) and only increases in value when there's a shortage of it for others.