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They may not be landed gentry, but even if they're still paying off their mortgages, nominal property values have appreciated so much that they have significant equity in the properties.
That's what they're protecting.
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They may not be landed gentry, but even if they're still paying off their mortgages, nominal property values have appreciated so much that they have significant equity in the properties.
That's what they're protecting.
Now this is an interesting topic. Sometime ago I was reading the Ancient City, where Coulanges discusses the economic "cycle" (don't know if I like the phrase) societies go through, where society's older, established, and landed part inevitably begins taking measures to prevent the younger, unestablished, unlanded part from taking resources from them.
Except here, in the 2020s, I think we have only the instinct without the substantial or rational reason behind it.
Because how many of those homeowners truly own their properties, and are not rather indebted to the bank for them? And these aren't income/resource generating properties, like the old Roman latifundia estates; we're mainly talking about older people, or their inheritors, clinging to ownership of relatively modest, solidly middle class homes (by 1990s standards).
In effect, isn't this just an irrational and socially self-destructive species of hoarding?