I’ve been ranting about the hidden costs of home ownership for some time now (here’s one rant), and today’s NYT features another that is often cited by economists but dismissed by home ownership zealots: job mobility
“You hear a lot about foreclosure and the thousands of families who are being forced out,” said Joseph S. Tracy, director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “But that is swamped by the number of people who want to sell their homes and can’t.”
I should reiterate that I’m not opposed to home ownership, just to the American romanticizing of it as some kind of rite of passage to adulthood + civic responsibility.
I always wondered whether the fetish of home ownership was an American invention. I haven’t witnessed it in visits to other countries, which of course doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist elsewhere. If it does exist elsewhere, to what extent did American culture influence its emergence?
I suspect in many other parts of the world, families stay much more intact over many generations, and labor mobility is lower, so home ownership might be a non-question. Dunno.
Americans’ unique attitude towards homes, though, is as a consumer item rather than an investment (regardless of the language used). Homes make for pretty lousy investments except for the sheer fact that, until sub-primes came along, your mortgage payments function as a forced savings mechanism. But turn them into consumer items and suddenly even that advantage disappears.
I know that when I lived in Australia home ownership was not a goal of a lot of the people I met. They were more then happy to be renting a home. It is really weird to me the difference in attitudes of them and Americans. I believe it comes with the American dream, you want the nice cars, great vacations and of course the big house. I’m sure most aren’t like that, but who does not want a house?