Your last example is the crux of the matter. Consider: As a percentage of the population, fewer people (in the US at least, though I get the sense this is true

Your last example is the crux of the matter. Consider: As a percentage of the population, fewer people (in the US at least, though I get the sense this is true elsewhere too) own their home now than any time in living memory. Shocks to the housing market exacerbated this trend, most famously in 2008 and 2020. Housing precarity (which we can simplify as "risk of homelessness", and for which actual homelessness is a decent if imperfect proxy) has risen across the board and I think it's fair to assume these are correlated Sure, there are valid reasons to want to rent your home. More flexibility to move maybe. Not wanting to deal with maintenance I suppose (though as economic and legal power has shifted in turn to landlords, you can effectively be responsible for maintaining a home in that your landlord will not be compelled to fix issues that harm you, but also legally barred from doing so), but it's objectively and by far the economically worse option, and the vast majority of people don't actually want to rent for their entire lives. The reason more people don't own their homes is because they are economically prevented from doing so by a combination of squeezed supply and increasingly unfavorable competition with massive companies and trusts that treat real estate primarily as as investment vehicle. People who rent and don't want to largely don't have a choice Nonetheless, press written from the perspective of the class who owns houses treats this as a weird preference the younger generation has for some reason. Sure, it's inherently precarious and long-term financially ruinous, but I guess they just like it that way? Usually when vast swaths of people are making choices that harm them while benefiting powerful people, the first-line model we should apply to the situation is not weird preferences This is more obvious with housing, but arguably even more true of tools, especially ones people rely on for their own work