> If it did, poverty would all but disappear; it's hard to be poor when you have your own house. I disagree. It's not so much a case of having, as a case of ow

> If it did, poverty would all but disappear; it's hard to be poor when you have your own house. I disagree. It's not so much a case of having, as a case of owing, a lot of money. Direct experience from my own family, it's really really easy to make yourself poor when you have a mortgage - because you can remortgage. And way too many predatory lenders are more than happy to let you do that until you owe more than the value of your house. Having a house makes it easy to borrow too much because you have an asset you can leverage and that way too many predators will let you leverage terribly. I agree with your comment in general, it seems reasonable - and I'm sure things would be better if everyone had their own house. But that wouldn't stop people being poor, not if their house came with tens of thousands of debt and they could leverage it to borrow more.