David B. Shemano wrote:
...As long as we subsidize home ownership through tax policy, housing policy, banking policy, etc., we are going to have bubbles. You may need an Alan Greenspan or a Wall Street wizard to ignite the match, but the fuel was already there and will continue to be there until we collectively stop smoking the crack pipe of the alleged intrinsic beneits of home ownership.
As I recall, the Kuznets cycle of 15-20 year property investment boom-bust cycles, which is what we're caught within a trough in many places across the world (as we were in 1989-91), doesn't have roots in tax policy, interest rates, and so forth. When reinterpreted by David Harvey (Urbanization of Capital, JHU Press, 1985), this cycle was really about the way overaccumulated capital regularly gets displaced into spatio-temporal outlets (especially property). So in that sense 'home ownership' is to blame because of the fact that it's a market commodity with vast potential for sucking in credit and amplifying uneven geographical development.
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