afloweroutofstone:

Also homeownership is wildly overhyped as an idea in America. It constitutes massive amounts of land and resource waste, and mortgages are just a way to get people who are financially secure enough to avoid paying rent to do so anyways. Yet the government still spends hundreds of billions of dollars every year subsidizing it through the tax code because of pressure from the construction, real estate, and finance lobbies and voter support derived from the nostalgic normative ideal of “the American Dream”

Yo setting aside the rest of this, the 20/30-year amortized, fixed-rate, federally insured “rent by another name” mortgage supporting a stable homebuilding industry REALLY DID enable equity-building among non-farm workers who couldn’t swing the previous system (5-year lump sum loans usually paid off in part and rolled over at least once, usu. for owner-developed plots, where credit shocks at turnover time could force liquidation on a depressed and non-fluid market with private magnates as market-clearers) and would otherwise have just been paying rent as rent