Yes, it was mostly part of the national psyche because for hundreds of years being a tenant all too often meant rackrenting, poor maintenance, insecurity, or being “tied”, yet a very high percentage of the population were tenants. Social housing and tight regulation sorted out most of the down-sides of being a tenant, then “other stuff happened” from 1980 onwards.
I’ll say the counterintuitive thing that I always say at this juncture: this country isn’t short of housing space overall.
The problems are that where it is located doesn’t properly match where employment is, and, biggest issue of all, the housing space that exists is incredibly unevenly distributed, so that some people have vastly more than they could reasonably be said to need, and some people have barely enough, or even none at all. The hidden hand of the market is generous to some, while waving two fingers at others.
Another way to look at this is to realise that at no point in the past many hundred years have the typical wages of more than about half of the population been such that they could afford to buy a house on the terms available, so the stoking of the aspiration to do so has always involved fibbing. The big boost in home ownership in the 1989s and 1990s was very heavily tax-subsidised, by selling houses paid for by taxation at artificially low prices, so it created an illusion of affordability that was unsustainable in the market. That isn’t a partisan political view; it’s basic economics. The political gamble was that it would kickstart sustained economic growth, but for multiple reasons it didn’t.
