Comment by spwa4

I agree but there's only a single factor that matters: special treatment of mortgage loans. In tax. Government guarantees, both for owners and for banks. Special interest rates. Repo with government support. The list goes on.

And now you can say "yes, but ending those will cause a crash in house prices, which will hurt a lot of people, a lot of owners", which is true, but anything you do to change house prices will cause that hurt.

In a way you can look at it as the usual problem: governments effectively sold houses, handing out cash to constituents for votes and power, and now they want, maybe even need, them back. They can't pay to get them back. That's what the argument is about. If the government wanted to buy back houses the way everyone else has to play, by paying market price, nobody would be arguing much. Because of how property taxes work, even if governments crash the housing market, say by ending mortgage guarantees, governments will lose a lot of money they have already spent.

And the fundamental problem is not the division of houses, but how many there are. Crashing house prices is only part of the problem. They need to be torn down and rebuilt denser if you want to make any difference. That also needs to be paid for.