No, home ownership in America is ~65%.
You need to pay taxes to support the infrastructure and you need to pay the bank to service your mortgage, but both are proscribed by a clear and largely static legal framework that does not infringe upon your legal ownership of the property.
A steel man interpretation of GPs argument would be that payment mechanics of property tax and subscriber services are more alike than people want to admit. You own your Netflix movies and land alike as long as you pay the subscription cost. Both eventually will be revoked if payment is withheld. Why should we call one subscribing and one owning when the results are the same?
Yeah I'm not sure why their post is so heavily downvoted.
You pay property taxes or you lose your home. You also need to build your house to an exact specification that your local government came up with, of which you have no control over.
In other contexts this isn't classified as ownership. Ownership to me is if I spend $300 on a lawn mower, it's mine forever with no future costs associated to it beyond repairs. I can do whatever I want with it, including modifying how it works or smashing it into a thousand pieces. Both of which are true if you buy a lawn mower today.
With the house scenario there's also tons of things out of your control that could be classified as "well, you own your house but things are about to get drastically different for you". For example what happens if you build a house in a nice empty area of land but you don't own all of the land surrounding your property. Over the years a couple of new houses are built around you and things are fine. But then 5 years later the town decides to build a fire station across the street from your house. Your living conditions are now ruined. A deafening siren may go off at any hour of the day or night and there's going to be extremely loud fire trucks and sirens all around you.
I don't know what would happen in this scenario but something tells me it doesn't end well for you as the home owner? Something tells me the town isn't going to offer to buy every house near the fire station over the market's value then pay to re-locate you to a different part of town (because you don't want to leave a specific school district or move to a different town / state). It also kills the market value of your house for future sales. Maybe at best they'd offer you a relatively small lump sum of money which is no where near worth the noise pollution and future loss of value on the house.
> You also need to build your house to an exact specification that your local government came up with, of which you have no control over.
Things are much less dire than this. My city’s zoning doesn’t come anywhere near an exact specification for buildings. It sets certain minima and maxima, but to call those an “exact specification” is a gross exaggeration.
Further, even if you need a variance from elements of the zoning, those are generally easy to get if there’s good cause (or in practice in our city, merely a not entirely unreasonable reason).
> Ownership to me is if I spend $300 on a lawn mower, it's mine forever with no future costs associated to it beyond repairs. I can do whatever I want with it, including modifying how it works or smashing it into a thousand pieces. Both of which are true if you buy a lawn mower today.
This in old, tired theoretical argument. Your lawnmower won't have much impact on your neighbor, but there are things you can't do with it: (e.g., modify it to emit poisonous gas, make painfully loud noises, or fling objects at high speed through your neighbor's window).
The answer is simply, you are subject to the law. If that makes you not free and oppressed, then you are not free and oppressed.
There is a huge difference between being able to do basically whatever you want with your property pursuant to the law and being constrained by whatever a typical rental contract for that type of property is. To imply otherwise is lying just lying with some fluff on top.
The results do not seem equal if you take account for the actual costs and privileges. Owning property has more rights and renting has more costs.
Rights: If you do not pay your property taxes, you will probably have 6 months to several years before your home is taken. If you do not pay your rent, the eviction process will likely start immediately and the landlord will probably make your life more difficult until you leave, even if you live in a state with stronger tenant rights.
Costs: Taxes are somewhere between $500-$5000 per year for an average home, while rent is more like $500-$5000 per month. Rent is on par or greater than the mortgage cost for an equivalent space, I have only seen lower rents when the home was not still mortgaged.
So while owning and renting may both theoretically be a subscription or a service with regular costs, the costs and benefits are not the same.
No doubt. I was just pointing out that there is a very different dynamic than the colloquial definition of "ownership". Just like you don't "own" your digital Kindle library in the same way as if they were physical books. It's an entirely different framework of rights.
I will still have ownership of my car if I don't register it. I can still use it as long as it's not on public roads etc. This is entirely different than if I don't pay my property taxes. I don't maintain use (or even ownership) of the property. Just because this distinction is clearly spelled out in a legal framework doesn't negate the difference.
There's a reason "real" estate derives from the term for "royalty".