One thing that's missed in the renter vs homeowner thing is that the rules of election systems favors the homeowner too. Renters move more and will need to register to vote over again and the added inconvenience will stop plenty from even bothering.
A commonsense way to describe what you just said is that homeowners are more stable and stationary and therefore more invested in the long-term future of their communities than renters are, which is an argument that urbanists laugh at, but one that seems very clearly to be true.
I think people basically know this, if they're allowed to be honest with themselves. Nobody who ever lived in a college dorm and then spent a "magical year" in NYC and then bought a house in a suburb thinks they were just as invested in those first two places as they are in the third.
Even if this is true, those communities always have the class of people moving through and that class deserves a vote, even if the individuals within it are changing. For instance, take a university town with population of 100k, 25k of whom are students. The students themselves come and go, lasting about 4 years each, but it still makes sense that 25% of the vote each election should go to the student community overall. This doesn't happen for a variety of reasons, but some of them are the sorts of artificial barriers like voter registration that depress the vote of these sorts of communities.
As long as people can't afford to buy they're "less invested" so no reason to address housing affordability... In the modern housing market that's a self fulfilling prophecy.
> How about that principle of one person, one vote.
Reality, in my view, is absolutely chock-full of contradictions. I believe in the principle of one person, one vote; and I believe that what I said above happens also to be true. The dialectic doesn't care that we might wish things were simpler or more straightforward.
In a world with stable rents, renters also become long term residents and invested in the community. If someone’s only “invested” financially I doubt that they have the community’s interests at heart.
There will always be transients, students, travelers, and so on. In a world where most people rent and renters are indistinguishable from owners, renting will cease to be a signal that those people are present, but they won't disappear. They'll just be harder to identify.
The idea that municipal governance should intentionally disadvantage "transients, students, travelers, and so on" is appalling to me. This directly feeds into wealth inequality and the cycle of poverty. I get that people will want to protect their privilege, but I have no respect for it.
I would encourage you to try to read those words without any of the baggage often implied. The reason I chose the examples, "dorm room" and "magical year in NYC," above is that those both apply directly to me. If someone in my neighborhood in NYC would have said to me, "you don't really care deeply about this place, you're just going to be here for a year or two and then settle down somewhere else," they wouldn't have been entirely wrong.
I will note that Washington state makes this very straightforward; universal mail-in voting with real easy registration has definitely led to me, a disorganized young person, voting when I wouldn't have otherwise.
