Surveyer,
You want facts. Sure. Here is a paper from Harvard that basically refutes alot of what your posts say. It is long too, but repeats in nausiating ways how current scientific attempts to show a benifit to ownership are at best problomatic and flawed.
-The influence of the disruption effect on both moving and non-moving students is a reminder of the difficulty in sorting out the impact of homeownership from the highly correlated impact of residential stability. In one recent attempt to do so, Denise DiPasquale and Edward Glaeser find that the length of residences is a more important determinant of community involvement than homeownership. Numerous studies seem to indicate that homeownership is
nevertheless still positively associated with the educational outcomes of children, but that these effects are exceedingly difficult to isolate. Joseph M. Harkness and Sandra J. Newman observe that while homeownership raises the educational attainment of children from higher-income families, these positive results do not extend to the long-term outcomes of children in lower income
families. In interpreting these results, Harkness and Newman observe that owning a home may exert financial pressure on the budget of a low-income family and actually negate whatever benefits that flow to more higher-income homeowners. Given this, they speculate that mechanisms other than homeownership – such as assisted rental housing – may serve to reduce residential mobility and hence provide an alternative means of improving the educational
attainment of lower-income children.
-Rohe and colleagues also noted the somewhat surprising failure of existing literature to focus on potential negative outcomes and an equally pronounced tendency to move quickly from correlation to causality.
-Allowing neighborhoods with high levels of homeownership to
block the construction of decent rental housing not only reduces the supply of affordable rental housing, but further reinforces the perception of the status differential between owning andrenting a home.
-Half of all minority households are renters, compared to only a quarter of white households. This difference reflects, in part, that minorities are younger, have lower incomes and are less likely to be married – all characteristics associated with a greater tendency to rent.
(anyone seen the studies that show that poor, minority students from single parent household are at significantly more risk for droping out of HS?)
-By expanding the range of choices available in the marketplace, and by attempting to endow rental housing with many of the attributes now commonly associated with owner occupied housing, the United States canmove beyond the false dichotomy of owning versus renting.
