Felix Salmon
Writes on finance and markets, now as a senior writer at Bloomberg, after years as chief financial correspondent at Axios, and is the author of The Phoenix Econ...
“I think that a country like the United States, which has a 65% home ownership rate, that number is way too high. … The optimal home ownership rate is probably closer to maybe 35 or 40%.”
Slate Money · October 2026
From Slate Money's personal finance episode, during a conversation about renting versus buying. Salmon argues that buying only makes sense for households with predictable income who won't move for a decade, and that this group is much smaller than the share of Americans who own. He puts the gap down to social pressure and the feeling of safety that ownership gives.
Transcript
Would you have been sad about that? Would that have been like something that disappointed you? I wouldn't
have, but I'm a weirdo. It also, I kind of like moving and living in different places. So I'm one of those people who likes novelty. And I think whenever we committed to doing this house, that was a change for me. So
as long-term slate money listeners will know, I am a big fan of renting over owning. I think it absolutely gives you a bunch of labor market flexibility. It gives you just options. When you buy something, sometimes it works out really well and sometimes it works out really badly. And the cost of it working out badly is huge. And that's a big risk that is kind of uninsurable in a lot of different ways, even if you have home insurance. I think that a country like the United States, which has a 65% home ownership rate, that number is way too high. And I do think that for a very stable nuclear family type situation like Emily has, it does make sense a lot of the time to buy a house. But the proportion of households who fall into that bucket of predictable income, we're not going to want to move for over a decade, yada, yada, yada, is much lower than 65%. And that the optimal home ownership rate is probably closer to maybe 35 or 40%. And that the difference is just a whole bunch of societal pressure and sort of non-economic factors where people are like, I just want to feel safe. I feel precarious if I'm renting. And there's a sort of psychological safety to owning. And that's like, you know. There's
also stigma, though. We stigmatize renters kind of as a matter of policy. If you read the financial report in the aftermath of the credit crisis, the first couple of chapters of it are entirely about the extent to which
U.S. encourages home ownership by a policy. And so I think if you're renting in Germany, nobody thinks like, oh, well, that's not a successful person. They don't own a house yet. You know, here it's
just very different. The orientation toward homeownership
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