Home owernship represents some of America’s intangible and tangible ideals of individual liberty and independence. Which I think is why socialists hate it and why Clinton placed a poison pill in the real estate market.
The American Dream is upward mobility: the ability to build a life for yourself no matter what your background might be.
One of the PRODUCTS of that dream may well be owning a home, but owning a home is NOT the American Dream in and of itself.
The politicians and the real estate lobby have tried for decades to get us to think otherwise. Until people stop buying the line of BS, the dream ain’t alive.