[drewmate]

I think it's a psychological quirk related to loss aversion[0]. Essentially, we view a house as belonging to the owner the moment the ink dries on the mortgage papers and losing a house is objectively a painful thing. Most people don't see the other side: people like me who never owned a home to begin with. I've likely missed out on 100's of thousands in gains by not buying homes with low fixed rates in 2008-2020, but nobody writes sob stories about that. The prevailing narrative is that all the gains from the crazy housing market belong (in some just sense) to the people who happened to buy at the right time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion