All else equal, I can see why the ability to live in the same house until you die would be given a high moral value. But in practice, IMO, this culture causes a number of problems. For instance, where I live, there was a lot of growth in the 70s and 80s, and a lot of young families, so they built a bunch of schools. It's an attractive place to live, so a lot of those people who lived in those houses when they were new and raised those families and attended those schools have kept living in those houses. But those kids that they raised there can't live in those same neighborhoods as adults, because there's no turnover, so they can't raise their own kids there. So now the schools are all half (or less) full, because the neighborhoods they were built to serve no longer have a lot of families living in them. So then they have to close and consolidate schools and everybody hates that. I don't really have a strong view on the moral question of whether houses "should" be owned by older people who have lived there a long time or by young people families, but from a pragmatic standpoint, this situation seems quite bad to me.
I think if we had a totally different culture, with multigenerational families living in the same house, then this might work better. But this model where we build new family friendly neighborhoods with parks and schools, and then nearly everyone ages in place and all the family amenities become empty over time, and the families all end up in the next new neighborhood and then it repeats, this doesn't seem ideal to me.
Schools aren't forever. They're just buildings that get built, expanded, replaced, upgraded, mothballed, abandoned, sold and/or destroyed all the time as the needs of the community using them changes. Some may last for decades, and some for centuries. Some have already lasted far too long.
It's OK that they don't last forever; they're schools, not irreplaceable shrines.
And speaking of things that also don't last forever: Homeowners. Grandma Sally isn't going to live forever. The house winds up on the open market in order to seek satisfaction of Grandma's debts, and then some new family buys it at market price and is free to breed a whole new fleet of kids to raise there.
There's still eventually churn in the marketplace, and in the neighborhood. The churn didn't disappear just because Grandma Sally was able to choose to keep living in the same place until she died quietly of an agonizingly painful heart attack as she stood in the kitchen making tomato sauce after church on a Sunday morning before the family dinner that afternoon.
People die all the time. It's often tragic, but it's natural and ultimately unavoidable.
People also get forced out their forever-homes all the time, too. That's also often tragic, but it happens for artificial reasons that could be avoided if we bothered with trying to do so.
> Schools aren't forever… Some may last for decades, and some for centuries. Some have already lasted far too long.
That seems a bit ironic?
> Grandma Sally isn't going to live forever. The house winds up on the open market in order to seek satisfaction of Grandma's debts
Not always, grandma can pass the home down to whoever. IIRC there are ways to do it without triggering a reevaluation on the original purchase price.
Ironic? Is it ferrous or something?
Anyway, Grandma is as dead as that Sunday dinner. She won't care that the new occupants are being complete heathens about smoking dope and makin' babies on the sofa.
Schools closing are a symptom of a community that has not retained a healthy mix of people at different stages of life.