Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2007

Cover of Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2007
Kathleen Holt
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A Home of One's Own

Buying Into the American Dream

By Lucy Burningham

Lately, "For Sale" signs have been jumping out from behind bushes, trees, and parked cars, accosting me with their blocky, unattractive print. Up until recently, I considered these signs litter-on-a-stick--shrunken billboards for a group of people who communicated in odd code, using phrases like "half bath" and "single family." But now, the signs beckon. For the first time in my life, I want to buy a home.

The desire isn't a radical one. In fact, ever since I graduated from college nine years ago, my choice to eschew home buying has made me feel slightly counterculture, akin to living without a television or a car. As my friends began securing serious desk jobs, they started attending open houses on the weekends, telling me tales of beautiful hardwood floors and peeling turquoise wallpaper. I feigned interest but felt puzzled. Hunting for a good rental sounded similar, but by the way they described washer and dryer hookups, I realized that buying a home was a far more important decision that made my jaunt through the rental listings seem like an exercise in playing grown-up.

But I already felt weighed down by plenty of commitments--to friends, family, a boyfriend, a career, and an unremitting urge to see the world. Silently, I made a vow: never buy a home just because it's what you're supposed to do. I knew the thought was somewhat un-American. After all, owning a home is part of the American dream, a concept that promises upward mobility and material security.

Ask adults in this country if they'd rather rent or own their own living space, and you'll hear a resounding "own" with a capital O. We've all heard the sound bites. "Why pay someone else's mortgage?" "Renting is like throwing money down the drain." "If you're not good at saving money, a home is like a savings account." The numbers prove the power of the adages: in 2005, nearly 69 percent of Americans owned the places where they live, up from an already solid 62 percent in 1960.

Home ownership in our society represents responsibility, stability, and an investment in place. Homeowners, at least in theory, trim their rose bushes in the fall and lend an egg in a pinch. But how we view the financial and social aspects of homeownership evolved from a long history of government funding and social movements unique to the United States.

The roots of American home ownership stretch back to the Civil War era, when industrialization began to force people into urban areas, close to the centers of production. Before then, people lived and worked in the same place out of practicality--craftsmen in shops attached to their homes and farmers in houses adjacent to their fields. But as workers started leaving their residences to seek employment for bigger businesses in urban centers, owning one's living space no longer meant earning money.

That reality shifted during the late 1800s, as new laws made private property not just a physical possession, but an investment that could gain value over time and be passed down to future generations. Many of the wealthiest Americans bought homes as a means of investing their money. Simultaneously, both skilled and unskilled workers, many of whom were immigrants, began to covet home ownership as evidence of their independence and dignity. The middle class, too, became enamored with the idea, and as the twentieth century began, private homes were viewed as places of reprieve, domestic spaces managed by women that functioned separately from politics and work.

Some sociologists believe that the turn of the century marked an important moment in the evolution of the American dream--as all classes began to adopt the notion of the value of homeownership, class differences were subverted. Despite variations in educational opportunities, race, nationality, and earning power, Americans felt united in one way: people wanted to own their own living spaces.

By the 1920s, 45 percent of American families owned their own homes, but already, the poorest working families couldn't afford the luxury, as the housing industry had begun to shape the marketplace. Seeking greater profits, builders erected larger, single family homes, big, beautiful structures that looked like objects worth coveting. The wealthy snatched them up, further shaping the American consciousness. The single family home became the epitome of property ownership.

In the New Deal era, the government responded to the needs of the poorer working class by creating affordable, apartment-style housing in cities . But more important, government programs focused on boosting the housing industry by creating mortgage insurance and low-income loans, both of which helped the middle class secure single-family homes in burgeoning suburban developments. The strategy sharply divided the poor from the middle class, a rift that became all the more obvious during the true heyday of the suburban lifestyle, the 1950s, a decade of neatly trimmed lawns, housewives with automatic appliances, cocktail parties, and cars that could escape the cities on the brand-new arterial system of well-funded freeways.

The rush to the suburbs is reminiscent of Manifest Destiny. Many people saw acre upon acre of undeveloped land, from the Pacific to the Atlantic, as pure opportunity. Fields would be divided into square plots punctuated by prefab houses on blankets of grass, and that grass symbolized another national ideal: just like their pioneer predecessors, Americans still wanted to possess their own land. And land and single-family homes go together like master beds and attached baths.

Even today, as buyers rush to consider $3 million lofts in Portland's Pearl District, they must at some point justify, out loud to someone, exactly why they don't want a yard. Because in the American psyche, loft owners still seem strange. Why don't they want land? The same goes for condo owners (who are frequently shunned by homeowners as transient) because they pay a fee to maintain the collective land under their individually owned spaces.

But in cities where millions of people are packed into small areas, the idea of collectively owning land doesn't seem as shocking. In India, home ownership within cities such as Mumbai, Delhi, Calcutta, and Chennai proves impossible for most, even the rich. Instead, people buy into "cooperative societies," which purchase land and then construct apartment buildings on that land based on equal financial contributions from each member.

In China, too, owning actual land seems less important than owning a living space. In 1985, the Chinese government initiated a housing reform movement that encouraged urban apartment-dwellers to buy their living spaces from the state, a new opportunity after decades of the Communist system of nationalized property. Eventually the government lowered the prices on those apartments to a fraction of their market value, which caused a buying frenzy; today, 80 percent of people living in Chinese cities own their living spaces.

But as proof that the urge to buy both living spaces and yards might not be instinctive to all humans, Switzerland boasts an extraordinarily high number of renters--70 percent of the population is classified as tenants. It's an oddity in the developed world that, to a large degree, was created by strong laws that protect the renter.

Even with the knowledge that a clean, well-run society doesn't always hinge on a preponderance of homeowners, I still find myself squeezing my squeaky bicycle brakes and craning my neck every time I see a "For Sale" sign, especially if it's stuck in a yard. So, at this moment of wanting to join the majority, I cannot ignore my upbringing. After all, whether I like it or not, I've already bought into the American dream.

Published in the Fall/Winter 2007 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2007 Oregon Council for the Humanities