It's not of lesser importance, because who owns the housing (whether houses or flats) has implications for the politics of building new housing. If the owners a

It's not of lesser importance, because who owns the housing (whether houses or flats) has implications for the politics of building new housing. If the owners are individuals, they often go the way of NIMBY, which in turns slows the (social and economic) development of the area. We can also think of housing prices (or rents) as taxes, which if the pace of new buildings slows and the area is still in demand is rising. But if the owner is the city or state, they can plan and build accordingly. So in the city I live in after the fall of communism almost all of the state-owned flats were sold to tenants very cheaply which was great, but now it's very hard to build anything new. Even old flats are horribly expensive, which is great for sellers like me, but not great for people that want to come here to work and live. On the other hand, we have cities like Vienna where a siginificant part of the housing stock is owned by the city. They are able to build new neighbourhoods. As a result, while my city is much smaller and less economically interesting, the price of housing is now near Vienna's levels, if not even higher. That's not good for the economy of our city either.