Just to clarify: Folks buy them in the US as well, much like you are likely to be able to rent an entire house with a yard. You'd miss this if you, say, lived in small-to-medium sized housing in the US simply because there isn't a lack of land in cities surrounded by farmland. But if you go to Indianapolis and especially Chicago, you can own an apartment. Of course, they might not call it an apartment, row house, or whatever - it might be called a condo instead.

I think it's more a question of authoritarianism rather than "Communism". If the state (or a corp) can take away anything you have without reason, then it's really hard to plan for the future. In some places all land is considered state land and you can only lease it, in other places the politics are so fluid your property could be handed out to an oligarch in good with the regime. Both of them have major discontinuities that disrupt decision making.

Anecdotal data from Poland : mostly, yes, they are owned by people living in them, or by people renting them (people having small amount of apartments that they are renting). Mind you - in post-communist countries, in cities houses are not as popular as apartments, as we do not have USA-style suburbs.

There is issue on the housing (apartment?) market, but it has nothing to do with communism, mostly with capitalism - big funds are buying apartments en masse (mostly new ones) and a lot of people started buying previously cheap apartments and renting them, causing prices to skyrocket in the last years.

Home-ownership rates are really high in most (ex-)communist countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_owne...

where in the US and its late-stage capitalist collapse is communism alive?