> home ownership doesn't significantly (or at all) increase happiness

N=1 but for me it didn't. I'm probably repeating myself on this site but 70 years ago a home was a box that kept you out of the weather. Now it's an investment that you have to treat as a going concern. Many industries - contractors, window salesman, landscapers, HGTV, realtors, mortgage brokers, driveway pavers, deck builders, HOAs, etc. - have substantial swaths pushing this neo-feudalist "your home is your castle bro they aren't making more land" narrative so that people are socially pressured into dumping their life savings into a non-fungible asset then spending even more on ridiculous things like building pergolas and updating a 10-year-old bathroom to purportedly improve its value. Everybody's become a property speculator and wants to "get on the ladder".

The upshot is that I spent a lot of time and money on a bunch of stuff I didn't care about for my house because I was concerned with getting my money out of it when I sold. Conversely I chose not to pursue several interesting projects that I liked because they might have been dealbreakers to potential buyers. The whole thing is depressing. It's centered around building/projecting wealth and getting one over on the next guy more than it is on having a place to live. Corporate homeowners have nothing to do with this.