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Comment by mjevans | Hacker News Reader

Skimming the article, an obvious solution seems to be overlooked.

Someone is probably a lot less likely to trash/destroy something they own / are in the process of owning.

Imagine if there was far less rental and much more liquid stock of housing units in markets?

What if everyone who was renting now could actually "buy" livable housing at that same level of rent; rather than lining the pockets of others?

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True, but beware the unintended consequences of 2007.

2007 doesn't have to happen again. It's possible to both make houses affordable for people with lower income and not give irresponsible amounts of debt to people who cannot afford it. It just requires smaller, more affordable houses to be built. I don't know why, exactly, but as a general trend the sizes of houses have just been going [up, up, up](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.census.gov/const/C2...) (PDF)! Consider that the [mean, median] square footages of new houses built in the US had gone from [1660, 1525] in 1973 to [2392, 2169] by 2010. Maybe the reason people can't afford to buy houses is that no one wants to build affordable houses.

Owning a home then limits mobility. If you need to find a job that requires you to move, it’s going to be a lot harder.

well, this is the general premise of actions like habitat for humanity, to get the owner/occupier to invest sweat equity over purely financial.

It probably works but the cost (and scalability) can restrict how fast/far it can be applied...

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