It is critical that any housing solution incorporate equity, in my opinion. Taking away home ownership so we can all pay apartment owners for our entire lives is wrong.
I'm suggesting we should be more active in calling for condos and townhomes instead of apartments.
In America, we have policies that subsidize owning over renting, like the mortgage interest tax deduction. I don't think we need more policies to make renting more expensive.
The status quo is of ever increasing unaffordability, means ever increasing displacement and gentrification. There's a cost for waiting for a perfect solution. Adding more housing now reduces rents for all compared to not doing anything, so even if it's not the perfect solution, we must start enacting parts that help.
Refusing to take any action is in itself an endorsement of the bad outcomes that are happening right now.
I know people can rent single-family homes, but I am also against institutional home-ownership. My point is that living-quarters ownership should be more universal.
>Nobody's trying to "take away homeownership"
When houses come down and apartments go up, they are. When companies holding hundreds of millions of dollars of capital buy houses during a recession and say "millennials don't want to own homes anyway, we're doing them a favor", yes, they are.
I know of no one in my life, acquaintance or otherwise, who has equity in a unit of housing in a building with a large number of units. And if someone does, that's typically called a condo, which at least in my 2 million person city is not common compared to houses or rental apartments.
Source: https://archive.is/eFvQJ , under the heading, "Condos of all kinds, everywhere"