Just Rent, Guys

Tyler Cowen sighs:

You'll note that Henry Paulson has been calling for the mortgage agencies to be resurrected as "public utilities" of some sort.  I don't understand this path.  There is a very good (modern) liberal case against more home ownership: behavioral economics is true, people overestimate their prospects, poor people shouldn't take too much risk, and the natural market tendency is too much home ownership, not too little. That's without taking environmental issues into account.

Yglesias takes them into account.