> For instance, yes, a house is often a middle class family's biggest asset. But, there's no way to directly tap into that asset without selling or taking out some kind of loan against it (second mortgage, HELOC, even a reverse mortgage if they're old enough). All of those things have, let's say, significant costs and disadvantages.
You're missing the biggest advantage: They bought the house with a fixed mortgage payment (assuming US and 30-year mortgages).
Their monthly housing payments stays the same in absolute dollar numbers, but it's constantly going down in inflation-adjusted numbers.
Meanwhile rents are going up for everyone who rents.
It's not hard to get a HELOC if necessary for expenses, but the real benefit is in forced retirement savings into house equity.
> given that just over 50% can't cover a $1000 emergency expense from savings[1],
Nope, this is clickbait financial pseudo-journalism.
The headline is a lie. Scroll down and look at the chart and the questions they asked. They did a telephone survey (which has massive selection bias. Would you answer an unknown number and spend time taking a survey? Or would you be busy doing your job and living your life?) and asked people how they would pay an emergency $1000 bill. They didn't ask if they could pay from savings, they asked how they would pay the bill. If the person responded, for example, that they'd "pay the bill and cut other expenses" then they were counted as being unable to handle the emergency expense.
Ignore the clickbait finance headlines. They're deliberately misleading and designed to make you think the economy is on fire and everyone's drowning.
Read the fine print on these surveys. The questions are also deliberately slanted, and the survey respondents are always biased toward specific groups (e.g. people who are bored enough to answer random phone numbers and take a phone survey from a stranger). These are not representative of the U.S. population as whole. Do you know anyone who would answer random phone numbers and take a phone survey, for example?