The news this week has been filled with ambulance-chasing coverage of efforts to stop the Great Wall Street Meltdown. Talking heads are making dire predictions. Stocks are plummeting and plateauing. Banks are closing.
The Republicans started it! No, the Democrats started it! No, subprime lending started it!
No, it started when we forgot what a home is.
In 1940, only 44% of Americans owned their homes. People forget that the Greatest Generation was, by and large, raised in rental properties. Most did not experience ‘home ownership’ until after the war, when the G.I. Bill offered returning veterans mortgage assistance.
It was something that many of their parents could only dream about.
This means that the ‘solid values’ so often connected with home ownership- family stability, personal responsibility, financial security, low crime rates- were learned in rental units. G.I.s simply brought these values with them when they moved into their new houses.
And what were those houses? Often 800 square feet or less, with a modest front yard and a postage-stamp porch sitting at the end of a straight-arrow walk. You can still see them in many places. These days they are usually low-rent properties, little self-disciplined squares swamped in tall grass in a ‘used-to-be’ neighborhood.
When I drive past one I always think: This was once some working man’s pride and joy.
It was a home.
Nobody wants them, now. By 1970 the average U.S. house was 1400 square feet. In 2004, it was over 2300 square feet. Somehow our shrinking families required ever more space. Even single adults turned up their noses at such tiny places.
Homes, the experts began telling us, were investments. They were to be purchased, held for a time until they increased in value, then ‘flipped’ for another property. They were cash machines providing easy loans at the bank.
They were the dotcom stock of this decade.
Everyone was urged to buy a house. If you owned a house, you were urged to borrow against it. If you had owned it for more than 5 years, you were urged to “trade up.”
Bigger and bigger was never better enough. The market became so frantic it went airborne. And the further it drifted from reality the more crucial it was that everyone “get into a home.” I recall listening to a radio editorial around 2000 that flatly declared there was “no excuse” not to buy a house nowadays, what with all the no-downpayment loans available. Refusing to do so was irresponsible.
Fads only work if “everybody’s doin’ it.” The overheated housing market needed to suck in more buyers every month to just stay alive. Hands reaching over the side of the bandwagon offered crazier and crazier deals to those rushing to jump on board.
Which is how we all forgot: home is about standing still.
New kitchen cabinets and extra bathrooms don’t make a home. Living in a place does. Not just resting there until a better place comes on the market.
It’s like the difference between a marriage and a romance.
Think of that little G.I. bill house I mentioned earlier. Imagine it at dusk decades ago, the lawn neatly mowed and the porch light shining.
Waiting. Welcoming. This is where you will be with the people you love. It’s the place you long for when you’re tired or sick. It’s your destination at the end of every day.
And, like those people you love, where it’s not perfect you work with it. A coat of paint here, some new curtains there. A little compromise, a little ambition. You arrange your furniture, your finances, your life inside it, because you plan to stay.
A house is an investment; a home is what you make.
And, come to think of it, you don’t even need a house for that.
References
U.S. Home Sizes-Infoplease
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