The NY Times (my emphasis; h/t Paul Krugman):
The desire to own your own home, long a bedrock of the American Dream, is fast becoming a casualty of the worst housing downturn since the Great Depression.Two aspects of the mid-20th century "American Dream" are "happy motoring" (i.e., cheap gas and fossil fuel–based personal transportation) and home ownership. Happy Motoring dates to before WWII, and probably had its birth in the era of the Model-T Ford (perhaps because of the Model-T).
Even as the economy began to fitfully recover in the last year, the percentage of homeowners dropped sharply, to 66.4 percent, from a peak of 69.2 percent in 2004. The ownership rate is now back to the level of 1998, and some housing experts say it could decline to the level of the 1980s or even earlier. ... In February, the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index of 20 large cities slumped for the seventh month in a row.
Housing is locked in a downward spiral, industry analysts say, not only because so many people are blocked from the market ... but because even those who are solvent are opting out.
But home ownership dates to after the War, fueled by government-subsidized home loans. Before the War, and for a certain period after it ended, most non-farm Americans lived in apartments; that was the old normal.
For an image of that life and how it was transformed, check out two pieces of fiction — one is Jackie Gleason's 1950s comedy series The Honeymooners; the other is the brilliant follow-on to Chinatown, the under-watched The Two Jakes.
Picture the apartment in The Honeymooners; that's non-farm life in pre–post-War America. Then watch The Two Jakes to see the post-War machinations that caused fertile places like the San Fernando Valley (subsc. required) in L.A. to be plowed under for cheap box-housing, field after field, row after row, veteran-ready.
My point is that this aspect of the so-called American Dream is both new and created (by FHA and VA mortgages). There's nothing natural about it; there's not much that's even American about it. And God didn't say it had it had to last.
I'd be shocked (and running for the hills) if we got back to pre-War levels of home ownership. But the numbers are falling. The article notes we could go back to 1980s levels. And if the current crisis succeeds in keeping wages low and falling (guess who benefits from that), I don't think we've hit bottom.
GP
