not mine. As Jordan has demonstrated, most of the time switching from a normal (non-rent-controlled, shitty landlord) apartment to a comparable home makes smart economic sense to a lot of working folks, especially if they like the town they live in and expect to stay there 5-10 years.
All this other stuff you are able to figure out about an individual's psychology based on this economic decision, well, that's what I don't understand and am calling bullshit.
Like car ownership, there seem to be a few issues such as this one which drive leftists bonkers at a personal level, which gets in the way of real organizing.
[WS:] You selectively quote Jordan's arguments about purported economic efficiency of buying (as compared to some abstractions), while ignoring mine - which are based on real life situations and calculations based on them. I have demonstrated (by the NYT calculator) to this list that cooperative housing - such as one in which I live - will always be financially better than buying a house. I have also demonstrated that establishing a housing coop in the US is possible, and quite a number of folks have done so.
Yet, you ignore these arguments and keep insisting that Joanna's (or mine) critique of the individual ownership model is getting personal instead of "real" organizing. I believe that the opposite is true. The failure to acknowledge real life, attainable alternatives to the status quo, and instead sticking to the conventional alternatives that strike a familiar chord due to intensive propaganda of the 'American dream' strikes me as politics of personal preference (and familiarity) instead of real organizing.
Wojtek