One Weird Trick to Forget About the Housing Crisis

“It should be so much simpler: Housing, being a universal need, should be a universal right. Instead, housing has been made into the primary financial vehicle through which Americans establish security in a system that otherwise does not tend to provide it. It’s been made into a wealth-building instrument, a commodity whose success requires all prices to go up forever, making this crisis and its attendant human misery inevitable. It has locked landlords into a mass delusion that anything but maximal greed will cause their lives to collapse; by displacing the profit-seeking obligation, it locks tenants into that delusion, too.”