> people are expected to take decades longer to pay off a house than it would take for them to build it alone with their own hands in their spare time. Somehow every non-homeowner has to be a policy slave to the passive income of some wealthy person.

I agree that we have made houses too central to net-worth, but most homeowners are not wealthy. They are typically paying a significant amount of "rent" in the form of interest on the borrowed capital used to purchase their houses. I'm not saying it's the same as the non-tax-deductible rent paid by renters, but it's a very different situation than an inherited house in a very expensive area that is owned outright.

> people are expected to take decades longer to pay off a house than it would take for them to build it alone with their own hands in their spare time.

As someone who built significant portions of my house with my own hands in my spare time, I can assure you that individuals artisanally and incrementally building their homes is not a scalable approach to housing. We should instead be building houses like we build modular flat-pack furniture, with major components built in controlled factory settings, and final assembly on site. The way I did it (GC doing the heavy structural work, my doing the finishing work) itself isn't scalable.

Yes it saved me money, but the amount of knowledge I had to build in order to effectively complete it isn't realistic for most people, who very reasonably aren't interested in the understanding all the different ways to do flooring underlayments.