Electoral calculus of tenure in America.

My working theory in the US is that we'll wind up solving our housing crisis entirely through the production of rental housing. It's the least politically threatening way to add housing, as it doesn't compete with owner-occupied housing the same locational market--different set of amenities, if nothing else.

However, the long-term implications of this is that owner-occupied housing will become an ever smaller component of the housing stock. This has serious political implications on the support for 'social contracts' that currently privilege owners. There are huge number of things that owners care about, which renters simply don't. The danger of this is already clear to some home-owners, which is why you are starting to see increasing yakking about the 'dignity of home ownership' and the 'American way of life'.

But while the data is clear that home-ownership is the dominant form of tenure in America, it's also clear that it's becoming less common. Now, the claim is generally proposed in such a way as to suggest that home ownership is near universal because it is normal. But that has never been the case. The statistics are fiddlier than that, because if you calculate home-ownership by person, the size of home-owner household biases the statistic--there are lot of dependents. (Even fiddlier, people paying to live in a rented room or ADU may be counted as part of a home-owner households, despite paying rent). So while a lot of the American population may be living in householder owned homes, the share of persons who own homes is rather smaller, and the share of voting-age persons who own homes is smaller still. So in electoral calculus terms, the 'party' which supports the rights and privileges of the owner-occupied housing social compact is dangerously close to parity with the 'party' which just wants housing to be cheap enough for them to form their own household.

Of course, "the future is already here--it's just unevenly distributed", so what are 'future-me' problems for the average American are already 'present-me' problems for an ever larger number of Americans, and it is only the mythos of home owner normativity/dominance that keeps things that way.