alt Hacker News> If however you care about the housing development decisions that will incentivise owner occupancy
Genuine question: who, precisely, cares about "incentivising owner occupancy" as a policy goal? What interest does that serve and why should the government prioritize maximizing that metric?
Basically right now we measure "what fraction of homes are occupied by an owner" and not "what fraction of people live in their own home?". It seems bleedingly obvious that the latter is the number we should be maximizing, if either. And in particular it seems to me that a lot of argument about the former is actually using it as a proxy for the latter anyway.
No one cares about the poor homes who don't have local owners!
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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).
> Genuine question: who, precisely, cares about "incentivising owner occupancy" as a policy goal? What interest does that serve and why should the government prioritize maximizing that metric?
Culturally, in many countries it helps with household formation (coupling, starting families), which, in an age of low birth rates, can be useful.
A key difference is illustrated in TFA. To maximize fraction of people owning a home, you dislike people renting or living with a homeowner. A spouse that marries a homeowner, for example. It would be "better" if they broke up and owned their own separate homes. Or perhaps they could buy two homes, one for each. Or they could by two homes and rent a third to actually live in - same metric value.
To maximize fraction of homes with their owner living inside, you focus on the ownership _and_ the lifestyle choice. A family living together is the best use of land in this case. A family renting a side room to a college kid is still the best use of land. If every home were lived in by its owner, you could still have 90% of your population renting and not building generational wealth.
More importantly, nobody cares about the people where renting is their ideal condition (at least for now - in different situations different ways of living are ideal). There should be nothing wrong with renting. Owning your own should be a worse choice if you will live there for less than 5-10 years. Owning a home should be only slightly better if you will live there for more than 10 years - not enough better to make up the hassles of owning.
If you rent make sure you vote. Make sure you have an informed vote, all too often cities will put rules on rental units that make renting worse for you. (bad tenants and bad landlords exist - good tenants and good landlords need protection from the former). Likewise while rent obeys supply and demand, when property taxes go up that factors into supply and will make rent go up indirectly - is it worth it? (I cannot answer the later question - the more important consideration is make sure the taxes are similar for rental and owned units otherwise you are a renter are harmed)
You might want to maximize owner occupancy because you care about the poor homes who don't have local owners - as an owner living in the home might be better incentivized to take care of it and provide decent living conditions, for example.
Allowing people access fairly illiquid and predictable housing allows and incentivizes them to prioritize things on longer timelines which is good for society.
I think that single family homes as a speculative asset needs to be done away with. If all this energy and investment went to purchasing, say, agricultural land, then more "little" people could own that and protect against institutional investors. Small landlords were only good because they kept institutional investors away, but now that they can't purchase more homes, the small real estate investor's money would be better used to hedge against market capture in the next thing up the hierarchy of needs, i.e. food. If we keep walking this back, then eventually we can prevent assholes from speculating on basic needs.
If you live in a place which is used only for vacation homes, or worse, only as investment objects, you know the value of owner occupancy.
Non-occupants contribute very little to the actual value of a place - they don't work here, they don't buy here. But they capture much of the value of other people trying to make the place a pleasant place to live, though rising real estate values.