you ever contemplate that sentence? "i want to own a house." that's the bedrock want of ~~~western civilization~~~ right? but it means something completely different depending on how rich you are.
a rich person "wanting to own a house" sees the house primarily as a generator of capital. it's an investment whose market value is likely to go up over time, and in the meanwhile it can be rented out to those who can't buy a house as a fun little double-dip of stolen profits. i say stolen because most of the time rich people don't live in the houses they own. human beings interacting with a rich person's property in any meaningful capacity is a necessary evil that they very openly resent. in their ideal world, your presence as a renter would be as a ghost, intangible, leaving no trace, making no demands. i mean if you're a renter you know most landlords just straight up expect you to be purely effervescent already even when it literally breaks the law.
meanwhile to working class person, "wanting to own a house" means wanting a place to live that you can't be fucking evicted from. it means a home that you can reasonably expect to stay for longer than a year or two.
i don't want to be "a homeowner." i want to live in a place surrounded by people who live in that place, all of us rooted and safe, where we can build something that lasts. i only want to own a house insofar as it puts something solid and heavy under my feet, and keeps the rain off my head. the perversity of ownership is inescapable and its logic is a cancer on society
"i don't want to own a house, i just want to be able to live somewhere"
how do you think this whole machine started? our generation spent so much of our lives attaching and detaching value from worthless things, we're surprised when we need the one thing in this planet that actually has value - land - and everyone in every layer is trying to profit from it
it's like being in a room where people with big metal boots are stomping on other people. "oh stomping on other people is not my thing, is there somewhere else i can stand?" sure, there's a special place for people that don't want to stomp on others. it's right beside the people that can't stomp on others. under the boots.
you want to not stomp and not be stomped on, you need to bring a spike with you.