I'm down-voting you because you haven't made an argument in the face of the issue.
The flaw the assumption is that somehow 'buying' a home that is 15x your annual salary, that takes your entire life to pay off, is some kind of 'freedom'.
The flaw the assumption is that somehow 'buying' a home that is 15x your annual salary, that takes your entire life to pay off, is some kind of 'freedom'.
A mortgage is debt, yes. However the money you put into the mortgage is wealth that you're slowly accruing. If you're just renting a property someone else owns you're not accruing anything at all. No one thinks that taking on a 20-30 year debt is a good thing. People only do it out of necessity.
"just pay someone else's mortgage instead?" - it has nothing to do with what the owner of the property is doing with their money. If rent is a more viable option, then rent.
Ontario, Canada has a soft kind of rent control that works somewhat well for renting, that's an option.
Including housing in inflation calculations would be another 'option' because very low interest rates create bubbles.
Focusing on affordability in zoning.
Taxing rental income.
Taxing homes sales over a certain price.
Increasing or reducing property taxes.
There are a million variables to make the housing situation work better and crude 'own vs. rent' statements without arguments are not going to help.
Housing that costs half as much as it does today, and doesn't grow faster than consumer price inflation?
I think they're only looking at it from a financial freedom point of view. But I, too, don't see a 30-year keeps-with-inflation anchor as freedom.