You may object to it, but a home has been the smartest investment I've ever made.

Why is it wrong to want to have equity in the place you live? "Ownership" could be a house, it could be a townhome, it could be flat. But in the US, "owning" an apartment is very rare, while real estate investors buy up all the valuable land in the urban cores of cities and rent it.

The problem isn't home ownership, it's zoning regulations being done locally so that areas full of owner-occupied single-family homes are the only ones eligible to vote on whether higher density housing can be built there, in combination with the "got mine" attitude that causes them to vote in the way that constrains supply.

It's good for people to be able to own their homes. They should be able to own their homes instead of paying a large fraction of their paycheck to landlords as rent or banks as mortgage payments. But that requires housing costs to get lower rather than higher, which in turn requires some kind of state- or national-level policy to prevent local homeowners from sustaining the opposite.

> fetishization

Yes and: As you know, encouraging home ownership is policy. Meant to reduce elderly poverty. It worked, plus all sorts of adverse effects that now hitting hard.

I'd rather we had pensions, universal healthcare, and maybe ponies.