Against “American” Home Ownership
20th August 2009
Let us not, therefore, pretend that there is a deeply rooted ethos of ownership in America; the main tradition in our culture was conceived on wealth, not on property, and on “booming” not on “sticking” (to give Wendell Berry his two cents). Tocqueville rightly found the sight vertiginous, a threat rather than an achievement in the first modern nation. He correctly predicted it would aid in the creation of an elite plutocracy and the barbarization of the great masses. Our culture seems even now to have a weak conception of what ownership and property really mean, and indeed this misconception contributed substantially to our present depressed economic condition. The belief that housing was a financial investment, rather than an investment in a family’s long term stability and rootedness, led to a conception of property as measurable in terms of wealth. But homes cannot be measured in terms of wealth primarily because, first, they cannot consistently and perpetually accrue in monetary value and, second, they are peculiarly illiquid assets — which suggests they should not be thought of as assets in any case.