No mortgages, just pay rent to the landowning class forever?

Of course the US is far too much of a debt-based society for things to change (well, without a lot of violence and instability) at this point, but mortgages aren't a thing everywhere. Home ownership does not automatically equal debt.

Currently we have a debt based monetary system, so banning debt means we would need an entirely different monetary system. This might be worth doing but there's a lot of challenges, specifically debt in some small amounts allows flexibility and options that don't exist otherwise. Some other mechanism to fund future work would need to be created to fill that gap.