If you are reading this brief, you probably care about the nation’s housing affordability crisis and know something —maybe even a great deal—about today’s residential real estate market. You probably know that rents have increased dramatically since the Great Recession, outstripping inflation and especially burdening low-income households and people of color; that home prices are soaring; and that 75 percent of renters earning less than $50,000 a year spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing, and, of those, 42 percent spend more than half their income.

There is no shortage of policy proposals to address the housing problem. Some encourage the federal government to invest in building more public housing. Others suggest increasing subsidies to builders of affordable apartments, and still, others recommend dramatically increasing the availability of rent vouchers that pay landlords a portion of the rent so that tenants can pay less.

These approaches fail to take advantage of America’s biggest source of affordable housing: homeownership.

Contrary to popular belief, owning one’s own home is frequently more affordable than renting. It is cheaper to buy a home than it is to rent in two-thirds of American counties. Even now, as America is grappling with systemic racism that impedes economic opportunities for people of color, homeownership is still often more affordable than renting for people of color