Our economy is designed to extract wealth from the young to the old and the rich. Home ownership has become a primary method of creating generational wealth and

Our economy is designed to extract wealth from the young to the old and the rich. Home ownership has become a primary method of creating generational wealth and that was a huge policy mistake. Even China has made this mistake. Almost all Western countries have too. So let me explain somethign that is often misconstrued about leftist sentiment, be in socialism or whatever: leftists generally make the distinction between personal property and private property. Private property is what we have now. We have wealthy landlords buying up houses to drive up prices. We have single homeowners who think their home value is going up so that's good for them so they vote for these policies. A leftist position is that you're entitled to own your personal residence but there's next to no landlording. Housing is a basic human need. The only way to provide it in a sustainable way is with social housing. For example, the majority of housing in Vienna is social housing. The UK came really close last century to ending landlording [1] (ie councils simply bought houses from landlords who wanted out). But if you think about it: there's no way your $200k turns into a $600k house without that money coming from somewhere. You're taking it from the next generation. Capitalism loves this because a) a bunch of capital owners become even wealthier and b) debt-laden workers and workers who will take any jobs they can get (ie it suppresses wages). In the 1990s, the average house price in London was ~70k pounds. Now it's over 700k. Pretty much everything bad about modern society can be traced back to private property, be it intellectual property, housing or whatever. People need to realize that if your house triples in value, you haven't really gained anything. If you sell it, what now? You still have to live somewhere. That means higher rents or buying an equivalently priced home. Or downsizing or moving overseas. This is why housing is unlike other assets. we, as a society, have decided to prioritize generational wealth from landlording by literally killing people by denying them housing. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/19/end-of-landlords-surprisingly-simple-solution-to-uk-housing-crisis https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/19/end-of-...