Home Ownership Worldwide

I think we can agree that we would like our society to have a property-owning democratic citizenry, which includes widespread home ownership. But the international perspective makes it clear that many countries achieve home ownership levels as high or higher than ours with no government-sponsored enterprises. It turns out that these levels can be achieved without tax deductions for the interest paid on home mortgages, without our very unusual practice of making mortgages into non-recourse debt, without government mandates to make “creative” (that is, riskier) loans, without 30-year fixed-rate loans, and with prepayment fees on mortgages.