Depends why they’re poor. The hopelessly dysfunctional poor obviously shouldn’t own homes, but it’s not clear that they should be renting either. They should probably be housed in supervised institutional settings.
People who are functional should be nudged towards owning their homes, because renting is a virtual guarantee of continued poverty. On a month-to-month basis, there’s nothing inherently less expensive about renting vs. owning. On a long term basis, renting is staggeringly more expensive than owning.
One big step that should be taken to make ownership a viable option for the functional poor, is to outlaw building code provisions and zoning laws that make it illegal to build, sell, or inhabit very small, modest homes that functional poor people can afford. The standard building code has gotten bloated to the point where it rivals the Internal Revenue code, and many jurisdictions add their own extra provisions to it.
In moderately to very densely populated areas, it’s reasonable from a public health/safety standpoint to require connection to either a sewer or septic system, and to require that attached homes or homes that are just a few feet from another home have very basic fire safety features (e.g. roof jumps for rowhouses, barriers between floors of multi-story dwellings so that fire can’t jump from basement to attic in mere seconds), but beyond that, it should all be thrown out as infringement on property rights. There are very few places in this country where a poor person can legally build themselves a one room shelter from scrap wood and discarded old windows and move in. And I don’t think there’s any place in the country where someone housing their children in such a dwelling wouldn’t be subject to either being forced into public housing or having their children taken away, even if the children were perfectly healthy and well-fed and the home was clean and tidy.
Government regulation has driven up the minimum price of housing beyond what many of the perfectly functional, working poor can afford. Laura Ingalls parents would be arrested and lose their children today, if they lived in the hand-built cabins, sod-houses, etc, that they raised their wonderful family in.
>> People who are functional should be nudged towards owning their homes, because renting is a virtual guarantee of continued poverty. On a month-to-month basis, there’s nothing inherently less expensive about renting vs. owning. On a long term basis, renting is staggeringly more expensive than owning.
Foreclosure is an even better guarantee of continued poverty.
Debt is a bad thing for everyone — it is a worse thing for people who are already broke. Renting isn’t ideal, but it is the best option for broke people. It is ideally a temporary option while debts are paid off and a nest-egg saved up ... but, if that never happens, its better to rent forever than to build a mountain of debt that you cannot handle.
Being house-poor is functionally no better than just being poor — except you have the added bonus of owing the bank a big pile of money that you don’t have.
SnakeDoc
Bottom line — a home-ownership should be a blessing ... but, for the impoverished, it is often a burden. Renting is less of a burden, thus a better option in many cases of actual poverty.
Broke people shouldn’t buy expensive stuff.
SnakeDoc