Not true in many, many cases. HOAs, condo boards, zoning laws, and historical societies can control homeowners pretty well.
One of my co-workers bought a condo recently and remodelled the interior. Got a great gas grill island - with it, he needed an exhaust fan above.
During the reno he got handshake approval from the board president, and ended up having a really inconspicuous grate installed above one of his windows. Long-story-short, a board member complained, they voted, and he ended up paying $5K to have it removed, and now has an exhaust fan inside that isn't hooked up to anything.
If you're going to buy, make sure you check out all this kind of stuff before-hand (especially with condos).
No thank you.
Ultimately we found a place without one. But all newer construction (1990 or later) we looked at had an HOA.
So if I summarize, you can't do what you want with it and you need to pay your landlord.
Why are people calling this 'owning' a house?
Historical reasons? Delusions? Sales tactics?
Even the city state kings of the first communities needed to provide defense and such, taxation is the obvious way to do that. Taxation of property is quite reasonable compared to head taxes.
Ok, yes, you are right...70 years, not 99; though there is some suspicion/optimism that the government will extend the leases indefinitely. The property tax in CQ/SH is only on second properties and easily avoided right now through transfers or sham divorces. It will be interesting to see if the gov is really serious about property taxes.
If I buy a computer, I own it.
Far from a 'situation that basically no-one is in' I would say. I suppose what you meant is that basically no one really own their house. Well if it's the case, why use the word anyway?
Words have meaning. You can't just decide to apply a word to a situation where it doesn't apply and call it a day.
Taxes too are orthogonal to ownership; where I live people treat the local government tax as another utility bill, like water or electricity (so when renting sometimes the landlord pays or sometimes the tenant does). If I owned a car I'd pay tax on it - but if I leased a car I'd also pay tax on it in the same way.
Words have meanings but are necessarily simplifications (just as a map cannot capture every detail of the territory). In legalese I lease my flat - but in English I own it, because how I use it and what I can and can't do with it has much more in common with something that I own than with something that I rent or lease.
On the plus side, single family homes tend to have far less restrictive HOAs than condos.
HOAs are a plague on humanity, but they're very hard to avoid in many circumstances.