How private equity is changing housing

One of the things communism did right was housing - in the Eastern Bloc home ownership was above 90%. The quality was not great, not terrible. But bad shelter is infinitely better than no shelter. I also think that it also excelled in K12 education. Whether because the german style system that was common in europe pre WWII was just left alone - I don't know. But until the mid 90s we really didn't had the school reformers to fuck it up. Right now we are as good as producing illiteracy as the rest of the west.

What does “home ownership” mean in a country where there is no private property?

There was a lot of private property in the socialist countries. I am not sure from where this thought even came to you. What was impossible was owning big private enterprise. But small businesses - like a restaurant or a shoe repair shop were allowed. You were also allowed to own houses, cars, appliances, clothes and almost everything else. Land was a bit weird - you could own, but not too much - basically stuff that was small enough to evade the collectivisation process.

The socialist sense of “private property” refers specifically to ownership of physical (or at least, nonfinancial) means of production, other than by the workers whose labor is applied to it.

It does not refer to all ownership by individuals of real and personal property, restrictions on other personally-held property are separate concerns from the abolition of private property, and socialists regimes, including those in the Soviet bloc, frequently have retained private home ownership, which is not fundamentally inconsistent with socialist theory.

Just about right!