It’s subsidized regardless. There are countless tax incentives for homeowners.
What are the tax incentives (in the US)?
On a federal level, all I can think of is mortgage interest tax deduction, but that was greatly neutered in 2017 TCJA, and less than 10% of Americans can benefit from it. And that is a tax incentive to borrow money to buy a home, not a tax incentive for home owners.
Only other one is 1031 exchange, but that is rarely needed for typical homeowners and is available to all real estate owners.
On a state/local level, I guess there are some locales with property tax adjustments, but other than that, I cannot come up with any.
If that didn’t exist there wouldn’t be 30 year mortgages. How that distorts the real estate market is a big open question but my guess is it drives up real estate prices.
Of course that has been a continuous policy decision for almost 100 years so it’s nothing new.
... but most places don't have the stones to tax imputed rent [1]: Belgium, Iceland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain and Switzerland being exceptions.
I have one condition though. If I should pay tax on imputed rent, then Google and Facebook should pay taxes everytime someone clicks on a sponsored link that takes them to their own property. Every time I bring up this idea that companies must pay taxes on funny money they spend within the organization, people yell at me. Microsoft should pay taxes Windows licenses that they use internally. No, you can't give yourself a "discount" and say well we charged ourselves zero dollars so we owe no taxes. Pay taxes on the market rate. Either make it free of cost for everyone or pay taxes when you use things internally.
Could they just say we "licensed/sold" it at a loss, and therefore take a tax deduction?
Why? Taxes should be the minimum required to provide for the core services of government. Big governments are dangerous. Also taxes have deadweight loss.