[estearum]

The theory behind it is that 1) economic growth generally accrues to land values so distributing land ownership is one way to distribute wealth and 2) people generally treat the things they own better than the things they rent or consume.

Incentivizing ownership is more closely aligned with objective (1) while owner-occupancy is more closely aligned with objective (2).

These don't work in the presence of capital's outsized returns though, which allows people who (for whatever reason) have access to more capital to recursively seize more of the growth in land values from objective (1) and therefore price out objective (2).

[ajross]

> distributing land ownership is one way to distribute wealth

Right, so you want to know how many people own homes, not how many homes are "occupied" by an owner[1], which is at best a proxy, right? Sounds like you're agreeing with me but just getting the sides of the argument mixed up?

[1] As the article points out, a single person can in fact "occupy" more than one home!

[saghm]

It's also a pretty dubious metric for wealth equality anyhow. If 100% of people owned their own home, then some fraction owning additional ones that no one lived in wouldn't really matter; the value of them would surely not be as high in a world where there was no renting or homelessness, and even if it was, I'd still take that over the alternative where every home is occupied by an owner but there's still not enough to go around for everyone.

[estearum]

That is correct, I am defending neither the metric nor the overall policy goal. I'm just articulating why it is/was one.