swear edging

housing is artificially scarce

Housing is not artificially scarce, because land is naturally scarce.

Renting will always cost more than the upkeep of a house because otherwise nobody would lease

On average yes, but you also do not need to account for variability in price due to for example, having to replace the plumbing every 20 years or so.

All your issues with personal ownership of a house stem from other people treating housing as private property that can be invested in

This addresses none of the things I listed.

Given a rental apartment with an affordable rent where I could live as long as I want, why would I want to own property instead?

I don’t want to worry about the plumbing being replaced or the floor having water damage, and that putting tens of thousands of costs on me randomly. I don’t want to speculate what the price of the apartment is in ten years and how that affects my mortgage. I don’t want to not have housing anymore if I get a pest infestation.

I think it’s the other way round, people own property because it is seen (and often is) the only way to have reasonable housing costs and not worry about having to move if you don’t want to.

A single home owner does not expect to profit from that investment

What are you talking about? People definitely buy homes as an investment so that they can sell it and retire.

increase in value provides the means to move to a new home

What is this, if not profiting off an investment?

Housing being a human right has nothing to do with getting rid of rental properties. If anything, having to buy a house is a lot bigger barrier to housing than rent.

What we need is rent to be affordable, and landlords to do their job, i.e. maintain and fix the apartments. There are many ways to achieve this: government owned housing, legal regulation, tenant unions etc. Everybody buing a house or an apartment is not one of them.

Homeowners also treat their home as an investment. Which also makes housing more expensive and inaccessible. Moving away from renting is not the solution, we need a more comprehensive change in the system.

Darcs does not require a central server, and works perfectly in offline mode.

Git can be used that way too. Am I missing something?