Ah, I am totally on board with looking at home ownership as a class marker purely because we are currently living in an insane asset bubble. When annual equity rises creates more material profit than wages (which it certainly does in my part of the UK) then home -ownership should absolutely be considered as a middle class phenomenon. I get that there are a number of people on here who are buying/own their own, no doubt modest properties, but a refusal to take the current skewed and frankly insanely unsustainable asset inflation around ownership of property, as a class distinction, is just disingenuous. I also see that potential profit is basically meaningless since one has to live somewhere, but the property market is untethered to any actual wages or ability to get on it (13 x average salary for a mortgage in my town...whereas only 30 or so years ago, the average mortgage was around 3x wages/salary). Home ownership has basically been a bribe to counteract wage stagnation...as
Brainaddict infers...and under current conditions of artificially skewed supply and demand, with property as a prime 'investment opportunity, it would be odd to fail to consider home ownership as an essential distinction in definitions of social class.
Afaic, the solution is obviously the abolishment of private property and a programme of state funded housing as a human right.
However... the current social engineering in council house properties, as with any rentals which rest on social contracts such as 'behaviour', is dubious and has significance in power relations. I can be evicted from my supposedly secure tenancy if I am deemed an 'anti-social risk'...regardless of whether I have paid the rent or not. These restrictions do not pertain in a situation of home ownership...so I recognise the complexities of using home ownership as a simplified class descriptor...but nonetheless, this should indeed be part of a materialist left analysis, (I think).
Confession - I own a small wood, which I bought for 32K, 10 years ago. It is currently valued at around 75K which means I have 'earned' 4K a year from simply owning this material asset. It isn't unusual for a small family home to increase in value more than 30K a year, in the wealthy and privileged town where I live...but even houses in the NW have become wildly disconnected from the 'real' economy of wages and earnings.