Sigh..no thanks. A "Vienna model" of 80% living in subsidized apartments is quite a bit different from the American dream of owning one's own private property.
I'm not suggesting that subsidized housing is the answer, but it is a reality which seems to be working for Vienna (if the article is to be believed).
Almost 70 percent of Americans own their own home[0].
[0]https://www.thezebra.com/resources/research/homeownership-st...
This interpretation appears to significantly misconstrue the article's source data.
> Q: How is homeownership rate calculated?
> A: According to the U.S Census Survey, the homeownership rate is computed by dividing the number of owner-occupied housing units by the number of occupied housing units or households.
That's the rate of homes that are owned, NOT the rate of people who own homes. If I live in a house I own, and you live in a rented apartment shared with 98 other people, this metric would call that a 50% ownership rate (1/2 housing units) instead of the much more sane interpretation of 1% (1/100 people). If my adult children live with me because they can't afford their own homes, this site lumps them in with homeowners because they're part of a "household". People who cannot afford to buy homes very famously often live with roommates, partners, or their parents.
I'm sorry, but that's just not a salient interpretation.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnwake/2023/03/31/us-has-3rd-...
The Baltic states have a high percentage on this list and as a citizen of one of them (and also US citizen) I can contrast them to the US picture as an example.
First, what is a household? If I am 40 and I live in my parents basement of the house they own, that's "100% ownership" vs if I move out on my own and rent, that's only 50% ownership. The US culture for better or worse encourages young people to move out as soon as possible (recently, we talk about people living with their parents longer as a negative economic indicator - but in other countries that's been the case and to a greater degree forever.)
Second, what is your population trend? Latvia as an example has gone through a pretty deep depopulation in recent decades, so obviously pressure on the housing stock (and therefore, the price) is much lower compared to places with population growth like the US.
Third, related, immigration - newcomers to your country are less likely to be established or have access to ancestral homes. US has high immigration and especially of poor folks from South America so of course that's going to drag the rate down. Japan on the other hand has little inward migration + rapid aging that makes it easier to "fit" the population into family owned homes.
Fourth, quality and size of housing. US home-owners invest in relatively better housing stock and build better equity via long term mortgages. A family choses between a home they can buy outright vs a home they wish to have and are happy to finance. It's obviously easier to buy a dilapidated shack outright in rural Latvia than, say, a nice one family in a nice town in the US but that is a choice that people make.
TLDR - I am responding to a comment about the American Dream. It's very possible for both natives and immigrants in the US to have a better life (including access to / ownership of better housing) than would be available to them elsewhere.
I think your assertion are interesting. The first thing that comes to mind was reading about a study on eating disorders and American television — Fijians women with access to American TV very abruptly developed dysmorphia and complementary eating disorders [1]. I think this is interesting in this context because it's programmed self-harm, and it is programmed by the influences of a foreign culture. I would say that it follows, that potential migrants, when exposed to the American dream, are liable to the same inclination towards self-harm programming.
Things like eschewing their cultural heritage, migration, assumption of American cultural motifs. And upon migration, because of the differences in wealth, they - depending on where they came from and what they're made of - are easily exploited. They may also be relatively hardy in the context of American adversity. And that's all besides the erosion of communities.
And that's an interesting point, as the endemic American population and many other "developed" nations are reeling their populations back - I expect due to decline in the expected quality of life. Succinctly: we shuttle people in to scam them.
I can't say what is right or wrong. It's a matter of priorities. As an American, I feel like I'm looking at a socioeconomic hellscape.
Yeah, you can get a nice house if you work your life away as a laborer. Our banks will dole out auto loans, housing loans, and they'll trap you in hundreds of thousands of debt because the money [was] free. And maybe I'm all wrong, but I feel like, were I able, I'd prefer a humble life as a goatherd in Romania as opposed to an American economic unit.
[1]: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/03/fijian-girls-...
But at what cost? To own a home, but to be grindingly poor in all other respects? To barely be able to make ends meet, to see retirement as a pipe dream, or only achievable in the final few years of life?
The Vienna model looks like paradise. And this, coming from someone who _does_ own a home, and from that, can see opportunities that have been taken from me by stratospheric home valuations and insane levels of rent.
A lien is just that, a lien. It's something that encumbers the sale of the property; nothing more; nothing less.
Yes (nearly) everyone would prefer to own their own home, but it's becoming more and more unaffordable and it's largely to do with rent seeking.