[bradleyjg]

Owning a house a the sine qua non of middle class life was a) a historical anomaly and b) a big mistake.

We can’t fix the cost of housing because so many people own houses. If 10% of people owned their own homes and the rest were owned by corporate landlords we would not have politicians climbing all over each other to make sure that homes values are a one way bet.

[kcplate]

Do you feel that somehow politicians wouldn’t be influenced by the corporate landlords to a beneficial direction to the landlord over the tenant?

Or that wealth is better held by corporations than by individuals?

[bradleyjg]

Politicians would like to help corporate donors, all other things being equal. But that imperative for any particular donor is no where near as strong as the need to acquiesce to desires of a large majority of their most engaged constituents (i.e. homeowners). The times when politicians are most strongly in favor of a particular company/industry is when they have a lot of jobs in the district. Campaign donations are a means to an end. Pissing off large numbers of voters directly contradicts that end.

[kcplate]

> Pissing off large numbers of voters directly contradicts that end.

Pissing off large numbers of voters is a daily occurrence by virtually every politician in the US. Politicians don’t care about that. They only care about pissing off certain voters and certain political leaders.

[1letterunixname]

Perhaps. The issue is how much power they can organize into impact. If you piss off a million people with psychosis and intense depression, it might be survivable compared to angering thousands of rich Christian cattle ranchers who call their lobbyists to fine-tune the political hacks in office to their liking. It's not impossible to do it without means, it's more difficult to play the game as an outsider from below rather than work connections through channels from at or above.

[bradleyjg]

Homeowners are in the category of “certain voters” hence the uniform efforts of all level of government to try to make sure prices go up and up.

[kcplate]

Yes, which is a good thing. Why not create wealth that the citizenry can take advantage of?

Politicians in your world would never see any community voter permanence, because if everyone is a resident, everyone is effectively a transient voter to them. You would only need to kowtow and keep them happy for the 6 months prior to the election.

The communities have no anchors…except for the corporations that own all the property. They would have all the power and that sounds horrible to me.

[bradleyjg]

It’s a good thing if you are a homeowner. But homeownership is further and further away from the have-nots. It’s getting to the point where generational wealth is needed to come up with a down payment in a lot of regions. And there’s no way to square the circle—we can’t have affordable and a great investment that goes up all the time.

[1letterunixname]

We need to subsidize the building of houses outside of dense urban areas but close enough to areas offering employment choices. As of now, the inventory is primarily being driven towards the high-end in a "trickle-down" non-management of inventory where average people lose interest in investing in themselves or the future of anything. Millions of disgruntled, idle, and dissatisfied individuals don't make for a stable economy or safe country. E.g., you don't have many suicide bombers, mass shooters, or addictions/crimes/"quick-fix" politicians of despair in productive, sustainable economies.

[bradleyjg]

Widespread homeownership is less than 100 years old. Before it people weren’t all disgruntled, dissatisfied, and idle.

The role homeownership and single family houses more generally plays in our culture is not a fact of the universe. They can and should change.

[analognoise]

Why was that a mistake?

It feels like less of a mistake than packing people in to corporation owned apartments forever.

[bradleyjg]

Because now that we have >50% homeownership we can never fix housing. Those incumbent homeowners won’t let us.