Very well said. I have come to hate that word, "housing." And you're right, "schooling" presents a similar problem. I wrote a bit about housing a few months back in a piece called "Intellectual Sin." It had lots of overlap with your main point here. Here's what I wrote:
A friend sent me an article from Matt Yglesias, “The High Cost of Promoting Homeownership,” after a lively conversation a few of us had about affordable housing in our area. I like Matt. As thinkers on the center-left go, he’s as smart and reasonable as they come. But this piece bugged me. His main argument is that, on an individual level, homeownership is reasonable, but on a policy level, promoting it across the board is less important than it might seem. Technically, he says, we’d all be better off with a diversified real estate portfolio than having that same amount of assets tied into one home. This is hard to argue with on purely economic grounds. But that’s where I get annoyed. Because, of course, life does not exist in a purely economic world…
The problem with Matt’s logic is not technical but symbolic. He tends to think about policy from a strictly material perspective. Thus he treats owning a house like owning a commodity. "A house is an example of stuff," he says. I mean, yeah. But the trouble is, humans aren't just material beings. We don't just need "affordable housing." We need homes. So the difference between owning and renting is not just the material difference of what commodities are or are not in your portfolio. The difference has to do with whether or not you have long-term embodied connections to the physical space in which you dwell. And even from a material perspective, this spiritual fact can manifest in terms of crime rates, generational poverty, abortion, and the like. When people symbolically "rent" everything and "own" nothing, it changes their relationship with their own agency, values, virtues, goals, and beliefs. [Btw, I grant here that there could be a version of “renting” that is actually better for the soul than owning, from a Christian perspective, but that’s another story.]
The other problem with treating homes merely as commodities is that you end up with the logic he preaches in this article, that we'd all be better off if we diversified our real estate portfolios rather than just owning one home. Again, on strictly economic terms, perhaps this is true. It'd also be wiser if we were 1/10 citizens of ten different countries instead of full citizens of one country, 1/10 married to ten different spouses, etc. "You can never know which one(s) will fail!" But this is not the way life works, and certainly not the way love works. In this life, we must riskily commit to specific people, places, and things in order to see more generalized fruit eventually.
"If everyone owned diverse real estate portfolios, they would probably be pro-development and want to capture that upside," says Matt. Yes, of course. But that would be awful. Because then we'd have nothing but profit-driven investments in generic real estate "products" across the country with little to no personal responsibility for what becomes of those "communities," rather than neighborhoods with real human investment and responsibility where you live.
What I’m saying is that love is generally the opposite of diversifying your portfolio. Of course, the fruit of such love is quite often a more diversified portfolio, just as faithful marriage to one person can lead to multiple children and grandchildren. But to get there, we must not confuse fruit with roots.
This is great, Ross -- Iglesias' perspective here is inhuman, and technocratic in the worst senses that I've worked on trying to describe. The organization Strong Towns has argued that a key driver of our current housing crisis is an unacknowledged tension between the two uses of housing in contemporary society -- housing cannot both be a dwelling *and* an investment. You cannot have a situation where the average person can afford a home *and* for houses to constantly be appreciating in value (line go up!). So, which is it? Is a house a home or an investment? Currently, houses operate more as investments on the balance sheets of financial institutions (the gains of which are then sold back to the middle class in the form of 401(k)s and pension funds). This situation cannot be sustained, but the contradictions also cannot be spoken about openly due to powerful and moneyed interests.
You're exactly right. There are still corners of the country (we live in one) where houses are built to be homes--by families for families--and are passed down within the family without even the thought of selling. But such a phenomenon (which was once the norm) is now extremely rare and increasingly difficult to sustain.
Excellent piece, Matthew Stanley, and it reminds me perfectly of Illich's notion of "Disablement" as defining society, alongside the tyranny of certification, zoning, regulation, etc., which all makes modern markets possible. If you get a chance, I think you'd like his small book, "The Right to Useful Unemployment." A great quote from it: ‘Wherever the shadow of economic growth touches us, we are left useless unless employed on a job or engaged in consumption: the attempt to build a house or set a bone outside the control of certified specialists appears as anarchic conceit.’ (page 10). Also: ‘the decline in the individual-personal ability to do or to make, which is the price of every additional degree of commodity affluence'...(30).
Ugh, so good! The managers cannot abide anyone doing anything for themselves or without consulting the experts -- it's a threat to their entire symbolic and material order.
Very well said. I have come to hate that word, "housing." And you're right, "schooling" presents a similar problem. I wrote a bit about housing a few months back in a piece called "Intellectual Sin." It had lots of overlap with your main point here. Here's what I wrote:
A friend sent me an article from Matt Yglesias, “The High Cost of Promoting Homeownership,” after a lively conversation a few of us had about affordable housing in our area. I like Matt. As thinkers on the center-left go, he’s as smart and reasonable as they come. But this piece bugged me. His main argument is that, on an individual level, homeownership is reasonable, but on a policy level, promoting it across the board is less important than it might seem. Technically, he says, we’d all be better off with a diversified real estate portfolio than having that same amount of assets tied into one home. This is hard to argue with on purely economic grounds. But that’s where I get annoyed. Because, of course, life does not exist in a purely economic world…
The problem with Matt’s logic is not technical but symbolic. He tends to think about policy from a strictly material perspective. Thus he treats owning a house like owning a commodity. "A house is an example of stuff," he says. I mean, yeah. But the trouble is, humans aren't just material beings. We don't just need "affordable housing." We need homes. So the difference between owning and renting is not just the material difference of what commodities are or are not in your portfolio. The difference has to do with whether or not you have long-term embodied connections to the physical space in which you dwell. And even from a material perspective, this spiritual fact can manifest in terms of crime rates, generational poverty, abortion, and the like. When people symbolically "rent" everything and "own" nothing, it changes their relationship with their own agency, values, virtues, goals, and beliefs. [Btw, I grant here that there could be a version of “renting” that is actually better for the soul than owning, from a Christian perspective, but that’s another story.]
The other problem with treating homes merely as commodities is that you end up with the logic he preaches in this article, that we'd all be better off if we diversified our real estate portfolios rather than just owning one home. Again, on strictly economic terms, perhaps this is true. It'd also be wiser if we were 1/10 citizens of ten different countries instead of full citizens of one country, 1/10 married to ten different spouses, etc. "You can never know which one(s) will fail!" But this is not the way life works, and certainly not the way love works. In this life, we must riskily commit to specific people, places, and things in order to see more generalized fruit eventually.
"If everyone owned diverse real estate portfolios, they would probably be pro-development and want to capture that upside," says Matt. Yes, of course. But that would be awful. Because then we'd have nothing but profit-driven investments in generic real estate "products" across the country with little to no personal responsibility for what becomes of those "communities," rather than neighborhoods with real human investment and responsibility where you live.
What I’m saying is that love is generally the opposite of diversifying your portfolio. Of course, the fruit of such love is quite often a more diversified portfolio, just as faithful marriage to one person can lead to multiple children and grandchildren. But to get there, we must not confuse fruit with roots.
This is great, Ross -- Iglesias' perspective here is inhuman, and technocratic in the worst senses that I've worked on trying to describe. The organization Strong Towns has argued that a key driver of our current housing crisis is an unacknowledged tension between the two uses of housing in contemporary society -- housing cannot both be a dwelling *and* an investment. You cannot have a situation where the average person can afford a home *and* for houses to constantly be appreciating in value (line go up!). So, which is it? Is a house a home or an investment? Currently, houses operate more as investments on the balance sheets of financial institutions (the gains of which are then sold back to the middle class in the form of 401(k)s and pension funds). This situation cannot be sustained, but the contradictions also cannot be spoken about openly due to powerful and moneyed interests.
You're exactly right. There are still corners of the country (we live in one) where houses are built to be homes--by families for families--and are passed down within the family without even the thought of selling. But such a phenomenon (which was once the norm) is now extremely rare and increasingly difficult to sustain.
Excellent piece, Matthew Stanley, and it reminds me perfectly of Illich's notion of "Disablement" as defining society, alongside the tyranny of certification, zoning, regulation, etc., which all makes modern markets possible. If you get a chance, I think you'd like his small book, "The Right to Useful Unemployment." A great quote from it: ‘Wherever the shadow of economic growth touches us, we are left useless unless employed on a job or engaged in consumption: the attempt to build a house or set a bone outside the control of certified specialists appears as anarchic conceit.’ (page 10). Also: ‘the decline in the individual-personal ability to do or to make, which is the price of every additional degree of commodity affluence'...(30).
Ugh, so good! The managers cannot abide anyone doing anything for themselves or without consulting the experts -- it's a threat to their entire symbolic and material order.
Exactly, very well put.