another great article - Grapes of Rent

http://www.fanniemaefoundation.org/programs/hpd/pdf/hpd_1001_krueckeberg.pdf

Too long to quote it all here, but here's the beginning to give a taste:

Abstract

In a recent study of neighborhood development, Goetz and Sidney (1994) found an
‘‘ideology of property’’ separating the interests of homeowners from the interests of
lower-income tenants. According to this ideology, owners are better citizens than
renters, and therefore public policy should benefit owners at the expense of renters.
In spite of continuing research that shows this allegation to be false, a widespread
bias against renters persists. Why is this so?

A deliberate bias favoring property owners and harming renters has been prominent
in American public policy from colonial times to the present, although its exact
form has varied over time—property requirements for suffrage, land redistribution
schemes promising ownership but delivering tenancy and poverty, and tax
policies that privilege ownership and punish tenancy. Public policy that stigmatizes
renters represents a bias as pernicious as other biases of gender, race, religion, and
nationality.

Keywords: Rental housing; Property; Tax policy

<blockquote>Land gives so much more than the rent. It gives position and
influence and political power, to say nothing of the game.
—Anthony Trollope’s Archdeacon Grantly in The Last Chronicle of
Barset (1932, 178)</blockquote>

The bias of ownership

In a study of neighborhood development in Minneapolis, suggestively
titled ‘‘Revenge of the Property Owners,’’ Goetz and Sidney
(1994) document the conflict between property owners and lowerincome
tenants. They found that community organizations were
dominated by people who espoused an ‘‘ideology of property,’’ a key
point of which is that too much rental housing leads to neighborhood
decline. Affordable housing policies for renters were to be
avoided, according to this dominant faction, because they increase
the neighborhood’s concentrations of both poverty and transients
who have no stake in the neighborhood. Because property owners
are less transient and have a stake in the neighborhood’s long-term
well-being, policy should therefore be crafted to provide benefits for
them, halting middle-class flight and attracting investment and
stakeholders. This ideology—that owners are better citizens than
renters—is a modern manifestation of a bias hardened in stereotypes
that has misguided American public policy from colonial
times to the present.

Scholars continue to produce evidence to debunk these myths.1
Rohe and Stegman (1994) studied the impact of homeownership on
political and social involvement in Baltimore. They focused on a
group of home buyers before and after their purchase of a home,
comparing them with a control group of continuing renters. They
found that the home buyers were less likely to be neighborly than
the continuing renters. Although the home buyers were more likely
to participate in neighborhood and block associations, they did not
participate more than renters in other types of community activities.
Moreover, those home buyers who bought primarily for investment
purposes rather than for shelter and amenity reasons were no
more likely to participate in social and political affairs than renters
(Rohe and Stegman 1994).