Economics: The political-economy argument for the creation of America's post-World War II Homeowner Nation was that it promised enormous economic benefits. Having the people who actually lived in places and knew the most about what was going on powerfully incentivized to maximize the value of the dwelling units they lived in placed responsibility for prudent maintenance where it belonged.

What this missed was that it turned out to they were also enormous political-economy drawbacks to having an enormous critical mass of homeowner-voters. They were also incentivized to and able to pull political levers to maximize the value of their particular dwelling units, no matter what the broader system effects:

Addison Del Maestro: The Housing Famine: ‘The real nature of our policy-induced housing problem…. What do you call an artificial, policy-driven, to some extent politically driven, acute shortage of a basic necessity? A famine. Zoning has induced the housing equivalent of a famine…. The housing famine doesn’t mean everybody is homeless, of course. But it means that what should be a pretty unselfconscious necessity becomes a choke point in people’s lives, a source of stress and friction far beyond what it should naturally be…. The fact that there is even such a term as “housing advocate,” and that “whether or not we should build housing” is a normal political debate, is further evidence. Can you imagine if, in a world of constant and widespread hunger, there were people known as “food advocates,” who faced a lot of pushback to their idea that we should establish more farms and make it easier to grow food? That is precisely the situation we’ve gotten ourselves into with regard to housing—and worse, convinced ourselves that it is somehow not outrageous… <thedeletedscenes.substa…>