Real estate in America is perversely incentivized. In America, you are raised often to believe that you have not "made it" until you are a home owner...And, man

Real estate in America is perversely incentivized. In America, you are raised often to believe that you have not "made it" until you are a home owner...And, many folks are surprised to truly understand that even if you pay off a mortgage loan, that the government can confiscate your home after you fail to pay taxes. And, then poof, you are no longer a home owner. When i was a young kid, I thought that once you pay off a mortgage, that;s it, you never have to pay *anyone* any sort of "rent" ever again...But that's factually wrong, if one considers taxes a sort of rent. I'm not against government nor taxes, and actually i have been happy (yes, happy) to pay my taxes for the 2 decades that i was a home owner, because i saw directly the great school system and decent management of some (though not all) town infrastructure that came from tax proceeds/revenue...But, this idea that being a homeowner means you never have to pay a sort of "rent" (after paying off the mortgage) is just not true. And, yet, the real estate industry and other adjacent industries keep pushing that idea into your head. Many Americans are tricked into living under concidtions that are way above their means, simply to feel like they have "made it in America". I'd be happy if everyone was just honest about things: that a person doesn't really entirely own their home in the way that the idea is promoted. Oh, and separate of the decades that i owned a home, I also ran global web operations and digital products for one of America's largest real estate companies...and i can tell you that there's alot that people would not want to know on "how the sausage gets made". While there are plenty of honorable and good employees and real estate agents, sadly there are still enough shady folks...and its not all their fault...mostly because the industry incentivizes bad behavior...and by bad behavior i don't mean illegal (though of course that happens too), i mean simply unethical behavior. And, with this industry having survived the dotcom boom, the great recession, the pandemic, etc....there's just no way that things will get less shady. More and more parasitic behavior is on the horizon for this industry, so it doesn't surprise me that more startups are yet to come. Or, maybe I've just been too deep in the industry? A nd, don't even get me started on how foolishly many American towns (and of course American homes) have been designed towards suburbia instead of better, densely (and less resource wasting) approaches like towns in other countries.