What's this obsession with increasing housing density? Population in the developing world is leveling off. Most of the developed world is already at "peak child".[1] Housing shortages come from migration to cities, not more people. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/peak-child
> What's this obsession with increasing housing density? Wealth inequality is compounded when urban real estate appreciates faster. The Economist blithely ignores why governments are obsessed with homeownership, though--because homeownership tends to negatively correlate with wealth inequality. That is, the greater rate of homeownership, the less wealth inequality. So rents may be stable in Germany, but so is its mod…
The first source explicitly says that this only occurs "in countries where homeownership is widespread" (p. 67), and it makes the poor half of the owners vulnerable to price changes.
More importantly, the second document has an arbitrary selection of countries that supports its cause and ignores others. The relationship completely breaks for e.g. Denmark with ownership rate 61% and a Gini coefficient of 0.25 or Sweden (63%, 0.3).
One of the reasons is that ownership ratio alone doesn't explain how the non-privately owned housing is structured. For example Eastern Germany has much lower individual ownership rate (and lower inequality) than Western Germany. The rental units though are mostly owned by either by municipal enterprises or cooperatives (both due to the socialist history of this part of the country, the formerly public enterprises were transformed to their western analogues) - neither of which usually try to drive rents up.