In America? From the time of the earliest settlers till about the 1840s or 50s, most families had either built their own homes. I say most hesitantly. That is not including the tens of thousands that lived as indentured servants, or slaves. But I'd argue the majority of citizens (white males with land) built their families their own homes. Obviously it was different in cities like New York, but those weren't nearly as populated till the beginning of the industrial revolution in the 1850s. That's when millions of people came here and millions moved away from the country and other countries to work in cities. So I'd imagine a lot of people then aspired to own a home then (from the 1850s up to wwi ). Thats a long time period where we had our first real great depression in the 1890s. But anyways, obviously wwi brought us "prosperity". Such an abstract word . Basically, the war helped create and stabilize job security and real wages and made us a leader in a bunch of industries like cars, and planes, and trains. So from the 20s to the 30's most people had houses again or at least their family did. This tike period was short lived by the greatest depression in world economic history . This is where our modern day beliefs of aspiring to own a home were rooted. Mostly because nobody did. This shitty time period lasted till wwii kind of. Fdr got us Pretty economically sound before the war, pretty impressive considering he was handicapped and getting a lot on the side. Then wwii happened. Back to housing. During wwii we had the baby boom. Meaning millions of people were born more so than decades prior. This is partially because people learned from the devastation of wwi and the Spanish flu, that if we were to have another world war We'd lose lots of people. Lots of those baby boomers came back and for beating the nazis considered their generation the best. So the 50s and 60s is when you see the largest amount of housing development ever in the US. [Also because white people were afraid of black people, so when they came back from wwii they started leaving all the major cities and creating their own little white communities with white picket fences, called the suburbs.] So since the 50s we've had the notion that the majority of people deserve housing. And now we aspire to it, because we're kinda back to 1890s to 1910s type economy I described earlier. Workers are being shafted more than they were in the 50s to 80s so there is less people that own homes.