Brooklyn, for example, has seen an explosion of high-rent apartment buildings, occupied by nerds like us.
If you are lucky enough to own a home/apartment in the city, you are either crazy rich, or, more likely, brought the home before it exploded in value, making you "paper rich."
Many of the apartment-dwellers in the city make a lot more than homeowners.
Farmers, for example, are often multimillionaires "on paper," but don't have a pot to piss in.
Owner-occupiers can and do refinance to turn their wealth into cash. It's routine.
So do you. I assume that you like to eat? Farmers are how that happens.
> refinance
Are you familiar with the downsides of refinancing?
Yes. Actual food, not government-subsidized high fructose corn syrup.
And I have enough knowledge on the matter to know who benefits most from such subsidies. It's not your "average joe" multimillionaire farmer.
Same thing for farmers.