Richard Florida's skepticism towards home ownership is pretty well-founded. While it's not hard to imagine a policy that makes it easier for low income individuals to move towards home ownership, it's almost impossible to justify the current mortgage deduction, which encourages massive homes, architectural sprawl, useless positional competition, and a variety of other economic rigidities and social ills. If people want to do all these things, that's their right. But to have tax policy encourage it is insane. And the mortgage deduction is a particularly insane way of doing that insane thing. Here's Clive Crook:
