To be clear, this is my grandparents’ home (both of whom worked all their lives as janitors, so they’re hardly in the “top percentage of wealthy”). Their home is in a lower middle class neighborhood in Los Angeles. The fact that their home is now worth $800K speaks less to their rank on the class ladder than the fact that our debt-based monetary system has made even the most modest and meager real estate unaffordable in this region and others. In fact, they can barely afford the taxes on what their home is “worth” now. This was never the case in the past.

I think you may have missed the point I was making and what I was really railing against. Lower middle class people who now find themselves sitting on “valuable” real estate aren’t moving up the class ladder; rather, that real estate is the only thing that’s keeping them from sliding further down the ladder at a rapid clip. That’s the way a debt-based system is designed: in order to advance (or as is increasingly the case, to simply maintain your current spot on the class ladder), you have to buy into assets that “benefit” from the inflation that’s inherent in this debt-based system. When you rent, you simply can’t do this. It’s a speedy race to the bottom instead of a slow one. That’s what I’m railing against.