While I agree that creating more US dollars isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I do feel that tying this creation to property ownership is problematic in that it generates more wealth for those that own and a greater disparity from those who don’t. Property owners are generally more wealthy to begin with, or at least have more resources at their disposal in terms of financing options etc.
As a homeowner for the last 25 years I’ve enjoyed incredible growth in property value over that time. However when I bought that house it was not as an investment, it was as a home; to live in as much as I could and eventually house my family and provide the comfort and stability of a known and consistent place. Even if my property value hadn’t gone up, or had just kept up with basic inflation and property tax increases, I would be perfectly content in the rewards that I received and continue to receive, for me and my family. I didn’t think that property values were particularly low when I first bought my home but I did know that interest rates were very good and of course getting the financing and associated arrangements was pretty dang easy in the late 1990s.
The bottom line is people need homes. It’s a basic necessity for a stable and productive society, and it’s really not all that far behind clean water and healthy food, and might be more important for the individual or the family than even a good education.
The fact that so much wealth and wealth generation is tied to a universal NEED like housing is a seriously unfortunate feature of the system we’ve created. It’s exacerbated wealth disparities, and over time the separation between haves and have nots, especially generationally, can be tied directly to home/property ownership.
Over the last few decades, even if you provided comfortable, safe, and consistent housing for yourself and family, if you did it via renting rather than owning, you lost out on one of the single greatest wealth generating elements of our society. Simply through the act of renting rather than owning, you set yourself and your descendants up at a disadvantage relative to others, like myself, who have owned homes over that same period. This knowledge is what drove so many people to pursue problematic loans during the housing crisis. Just about everyone dreams of owning their own home, and knows that in our society home or property ownership is directly tied to wealth and wealth accumulation. You can hardly blame people for chasing that opportunity when both the evidence and the infrastructure that home ownership = wealth generation & housing stability is there for all to see.