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Finance & economics | Buttonwood
Illustration: Satoshi Kambayashi
Jan 7th 2026|4 min read
“That our people should live in their own homes is a sentiment deep in the heart of our race and of American life,” said President Herbert Hoover, perhaps the most important advocate of mass homeownership in the country’s history, in 1931. “They never sing songs about a pile of rent receipts.”
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