Home-owning families have been the backbone of conservative politics here and throughout the English-speaking world for the simple reason that conservatism is a defense of what is loved and what brings contentment. To put it less sweetly, conservatism springs from the dread of loss, the fear of exile, and the avoidance of atomization.
Liberals and progressives talk about housing as if the buildings we live in were just Le Corbusier’s machines for living. Provide housing like all necessities, they think, and man is set free to create his greatest self. The lonely figure in “The Life of Julia,” an ad for Obama’s reelection campaign, comes to mind. The individual, and his or her bodily needs, tended by the state.
Conservatives cannot think this way. “Man requires, not rice or potatoes, but food; not wood or coal, but heating,” wrote Simone Weil. “In the same way, for the needs of the soul, we must recognize the different, but equivalent, sorts of satisfaction which cater for the same requirements.” We do not need more housing, we need more homes, those spaces that are sacred because they are the depository of our memories and our aspirations. Housing is about space and keeping people off the street. Homes bind our affections (even our jealousies) to our neighbors. They give us the confidence to form our families.
As we consider the state of home-owning in America, we should keep that idea of family front and center. The marriage rate in America is at an all-time low. Fifty-six percent of Millennials remain unmarried — the highest-ever rate of singles for an American generation this old. And we are having fewer babies than ever. The fertility rate fell 4 percent in 2020, to its lowest ever. An America that currently has more than 330 million people in it produced in 2020 roughly the same number of babies as it did in 1979, when the total population was 225 million. It is impossible to untangle the economic from the cultural. Is the difficulty of obtaining a family home driving down the number of homeowners among Millennials? Or is a lack of interest in forming a family leading to fewer young home buyers? Or, as seems likely, are the trends becoming a feedback loop?
Any which way, it could be a catastrophe for the Right. We see elsewhere that as homeownership declines, so do the fortunes of conservative parties. In April, journalist James Forsyth noted:
At the end of Margaret Thatcher’s term as prime minister, the home ownership rate for London households headed by someone aged 35 to 44 was 69 per cent. At the time, the Tories held 57 out of 84 seats in the capital. By 2018, less than half of this age group were homeowners and in the last general election the Tories were down to 21 out of 73 London seats.
The Tories are currently doing just fine, even with their exile from London. Because their Labour Party antagonists had tipped so hard toward the upwardly mobile metropole, when the populist cause of Brexit became associated with Boris Johnson, the Tory Party was able to smash through into the postindustrial heartlands. But there will be trouble in the future as fewer and fewer young Britons get on the property ladder, build wealth, and become attached to the status quo.
In America, Millennials are finally entering the market for homes in force. Over a third of home buyers in 2021 were born between 1981 and 1998. But it’s not going great for them.
Home prices are rising astronomically in some markets. And yet demand isn’t yet bringing about the wanted supply. Home-building saw major drops during the pandemic, as combined lumber and labor shortages sent costs through the roof. Add to that the shortages of everything from gypsum to appliances, and what we have are fields of concrete foundations with nothing on them. The cities where jobs are growing fastest have some of the slowest rates of home-building. This pandemic price surge builds on two decades of home prices rising faster than incomes, making the average three-bedroom home far more expensive in real dollars now than it was in the 1980s.
Of 30-year-old Millennials, only 42 percent own a home. That’s a steep drop-off from the 48 percent of Generation X and the 51 percent of Baby Boomers who owned a home at the same age. In fact, some reports indicate that Baby Boomers are still holding back Millennials from the American dream. Between 2009 and 2019, the share of home buyers between 18 and 39 fell 13 percent. The share of buyers who are 60 and older rose 47 percent in the same time. Consequently, nearly one in five Millennials tell pollsters they’ve given up on the idea of owning a home. In a 2021 report called “Millennial Homeownership,” the Urban Institute notes that this percentage has doubled in just two years.
The urbanist Richard Florida has shown that becoming a homeowner makes a person more likely to participate in local politics. Homeowners are more likely to turn out for national elections, too. There has even been an observed political split based on mortgages: People who seek mortgages in the private market tend to be Republicans; people with FHA loans strongly tend toward Democrats.
After the failures in housing projects, the federal government doesn’t have many policies to offer besides more subsidies. In the budget-reconciliation bill now being debated in Congress, $330 billion has been proposed for various “housing” initiatives. About $40 billion would likely be sunk into repairs of the remaining government housing projects in New York City. About $90 billion would go to rental assistance, and slightly less than that to a housing-voucher program, though these items are likely among the first to be scrapped as Joe Manchin and other moderate Dems try to cut the bill down to size.
Progressives, looking at what a small share of the nation’s wealth is in the hands of Millennials, often propose down-payment assistance as the fastest solution. The theory is that there is low unemployment, and that therefore Millennials have incomes, but they lack the lump sum. There’s no mechanism, though, to prevent current homeowners, who would be selling into a market juiced by down-payment assistance, from reaping most of the financial benefits. If such a program were ever axed, it would send home values down again, thereby wiping out wealth gains.
It would be gratifying to say that conservatives have ingenious ideas for helping young people finally settle down and plant roots. But so far we don’t. Instead, we have lots of tinkering around the edges — decreasing minimum lot sizes in commuter suburbs, or allowing current homeowners to build “accessory dwelling units” (basically, letting people build a granny cottage in their yard). Some cities are in obvious need of more-aggressive deregulation of height and parking minimums so that apartments may rise above current one- and two-story shopping developments. But all of these would also require massive and expensive upgrades in public transit. Many salutary reforms would be stopped by current homeowners, who are notoriously . . . well, conservative. Each change is met with the cry “There goes the neighborhood!” And at this point, housing advocates are usually tempted to throw up their hands and pray for some way of delivering policy from the dread hands of existing homeowners.
But if I may offer one outlandish suggestion, it’s that we need to think a little more like Simone Weil — to understand that providing homes for people is not just about correcting and opening a market. Housing is subject to a traditional “cost disease” dynamic. Construction techniques improve slowly, if at all, and even small improvements are offset by rising standards of safety. And so the housing market is in a kind of standoff, where the biggest builders tend to construct the blandest and cheapest “international style” blocks in cities. In suburbs, they build large condo and townhouse complexes. Many of these buildings are built to sell rather than to last. This characterless and often shoddy style depends entirely on location for value, and many of these developments will lose the affection of their tenants and need to be destroyed and rebuilt sooner than we expect, imposing financial and environmental costs.
What we have lost in housing is the farsightedness of the city and town planners, and even of the industrialists and aristocrats, who designed their spaces not only to sell but also to bring glory to themselves or their cities. Building beautifully can help overcome the objections of existing residents. The work of “New Berlin style” architects such as Sebastian Treese shows that traditionally handsome styles of building can increase density without sacrificing human scale or a neighborhood’s traditional aesthetics. Finding ways — through public–private trusts and other investment vehicles — to build this kind of housing will incentivize firms to make beautiful work more economical, too.
The project of an American home relies on and includes economic factors, but it also transcends them. Conservatives must learn this quickly, or we will see the return of drab housing complexes along with the dreadful attempt to socially engineer a new kind of human — a sterile cog — to inhabit them.
Comments