the immense investment¶

Because capital has reified housing-as-commodity, home ownership bears with it the promise that the immense investment you made into the home can ALWAYS be recapitulated through the market -- as long as the reign of capital persists. For a worker, homeownership represents a crystallization of a massive amount of one's expended labor power (sifted through capital-owned production and a fraction repaid as wages) into a static means of survival that requires much less reinvestment of labor-equivalent than rent. Rather than, for example, dedicating 80 hours per month toward earning enough for rent, you begin needing to dedicate only 10 hours per month toward interest, taxes, and repairs. Eventually, the loan is paid, and the upkeep costs in labor fall even more. Depending on the price of the house, interest rate, wages, etc. you might invest tens of thousands of hours into solidifying a "permanent" solution to the most significant survival need – one which is deeply regimented by capital. The capitalist state is set up specifically to affirm the security of property rights, and by becoming a homeowner, you now become a beneficiary of that system of control – but only to the extent that it remains that control. This is the main reason even buying a home just for your own personal use gives you a material interest in the stability of the capitalist system. It makes it so a tiny portion of the state apparatus is now dedicated to enshrining that ownership "in perpetuity." If your home is destroyed by a natural disaster, capital will remit its value in the form of insurance. If you want to move somewhere else, capital assures you that you can exchange it. If revolutionaries threaten to seize it, capital will violently defend it. And so on. The more deeply you internalize a sense of the immutability of the capitalist system, the more you are "allowed" to believe even this singular holding of yours is truly permanent. [The above is unedited and was written while sleep-deprived. Please excuse clumsy language, lost nuance, and the lack of attention paid to many intersecting facets, like settler colonialism.]