What no economist has measured is this: There’s something fundamentally demeaning about being a renter, about having to ask permission to change the showerhead, about having to mentally deduct future losses from deposit checks for each nail hammered into the wall to hang family photos. There’s something degrading about the annual rent increase that comes with this implied taunt to its captive audience: What are you going to do, move out?
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I’m not worried about what it would mean for us to be a Nation of Renters, whether that would fray the social fabric or unravel homeownership’s side effects on civic participation or crime rates. Some people are worried about this. “FDR mentioned that 'a nation of homeowners is unconquerable,'” I heard the chief economist for the National Association of Realtors a few months ago tell a room full of policymakers suspicious of the mortgage home interest deduction. “We have to think,” he pleaded, “that maybe there is something more than numbers to a homeownership society” – as if we might devolve into some kind of chaos if enough of us didn’t care enough about our property to own it.
What I am worried about is the dill plant on my second-floor windowsill. I rotate it a little bit every day because it only gets sun from the western exposure. It has been dying since the day I brought it home. I want to put it in the ground, or at least outside. For several weeks over the summer, I tried furtively growing oregano in a small pot on the communal front stoop of our 20-unit red-brick apartment building. I carried cups of water out to it late at night when I thought no one was looking.
Eventually, it disappeared.
Earlier this year, my husband and I took a deep breath, purchased a power tool and did something permanent about our kitchen-storage problem: We drilled metal Ikea pot racks into the wall. Today the room is happily lined with saucepans. But every time I see the property manager coming or going from the building, I worry that she’ll ask to enter our unit, where she’ll spy what we’ve done to drywall that doesn’t belong to us.
More recently, my husband called our property manager to announce a long-awaited addition to our household that we thought would be welcome.
“I just got a job,” he told her, literally on the day that he had just gotten a job. “And my wife said when I get a job, I can have a dog. So I’m calling to tell you I’m getting a dog.”
As it turns out, we will not be getting a dog.
“You can have a cat,” she offered. (...)
I’m not worried about what it would mean for us to be a Nation of Renters, whether that would fray the social fabric or unravel homeownership’s side effects on civic participation or crime rates. Some people are worried about this. “FDR mentioned that 'a nation of homeowners is unconquerable,'” I heard the chief economist for the National Association of Realtors a few months ago tell a room full of policymakers suspicious of the mortgage home interest deduction. “We have to think,” he pleaded, “that maybe there is something more than numbers to a homeownership society” – as if we might devolve into some kind of chaos if enough of us didn’t care enough about our property to own it.What I am worried about is the dill plant on my second-floor windowsill. I rotate it a little bit every day because it only gets sun from the western exposure. It has been dying since the day I brought it home. I want to put it in the ground, or at least outside. For several weeks over the summer, I tried furtively growing oregano in a small pot on the communal front stoop of our 20-unit red-brick apartment building. I carried cups of water out to it late at night when I thought no one was looking.
Eventually, it disappeared.
Earlier this year, my husband and I took a deep breath, purchased a power tool and did something permanent about our kitchen-storage problem: We drilled metal Ikea pot racks into the wall. Today the room is happily lined with saucepans. But every time I see the property manager coming or going from the building, I worry that she’ll ask to enter our unit, where she’ll spy what we’ve done to drywall that doesn’t belong to us.
More recently, my husband called our property manager to announce a long-awaited addition to our household that we thought would be welcome.
“I just got a job,” he told her, literally on the day that he had just gotten a job. “And my wife said when I get a job, I can have a dog. So I’m calling to tell you I’m getting a dog.”
As it turns out, we will not be getting a dog.
“You can have a cat,” she offered. (...)
Now we have each been at this – renting – for about a decade, and we’re reaching that point, married, starting our 30s, when it starts to feel like time to live in a more dignified way. We want to grow herbs outdoors and shop in the heavy-duty hardware store aisles and change the color of our living room. We want to make irreversible choices about wall fixtures and rash decisions at the animal shelter.
I've been thinking about all of these things a lot lately, while reading about the convincing reasons why homeownership no longer makes as much sense as it used to. Workers are no longer tied to factories – and the bedroom communities that surround them – because no one works in factories anymore. Now people telecommute. They get transferred to Japan indefinitely. Companies no longer offer the implicit contract of lifetime employment for hard workers, and so hard workers think nothing of updating their résumés every day.
And I think about my own transience: I’ve lived in eight apartments in six cities over the past nine years. My husband and I like to pick up and move (most recently, just eight blocks down the street from our previous place) as if we were selecting a new grocery store. We have a motto as a couple, which applies equally to weekend and life plans: “We’ll see how we feel,” we say.
We have trouble thinking beyond the nearest horizon, not because we don’t like the idea of commitment, but because we want to be free to theoretically commit to anything that may come up tomorrow. What if an incredible job offer wants to relocate us to Riyadh? What if we wake up Saturday morning and decide that we’ve tired of Washington, D.C.? What if – as many of our friends have experienced – one of us loses a job?
We’re both afflicted with a dangerous daydreaming ability to envision ourselves living anywhere we step off a plane. We never take a trip and think, “It’s wonderful to visit friends in Seattle,” or “Chicago is a great place for tourists in the summertime.” We always think: What if we lived here? Maybe we should live here? We could live in Key West! My husband has never even been to Portland, but we still nurse a sneaking suspicion that we should probably be living there.
In this way, we are the quintessential young professionals of the new economy – restless knowledge workers who deal in “projects,” not “careers,” who can no sooner commit to a mortgage than we can a lifetime of desk work. Our attitude is a national epidemic. It’s harder to get a mortgage today than it was 10 years ago. But a lot of people also just don’t want one any more. At the height of the housing boom, 69 percent of American households owned their homes. Housing researcher Arthur Nelson predicted to me that number would fall to 62 percent by 2020, meaning every residence built between now and then will need to be a rental.
I haven’t been able to figure out in my own household, however, how this aversion to permanence can coexist with our rising ire about renting. And I don’t know how whole cities will accommodate this new demographic: the middle-class forever renter.
Both Nelson and Florida have floated the idea that we need some kind of hybrid rental/homeownership model, some system that decouples “renter” status from income class, while allowing professionals who would have been homeowners 20 years ago to live in a comparable setting without the millstone. Maybe we allow renters to customize their homes as if they owned them, or we enable condo owners to quickly unload property to rental agents.
Short of putting us all in houseboats, I don’t know what these hybrid homes would look like, how they’d be paid for or if anyone will be willing to build them. But I suspect the trick lies outside of the architectural and financial details, that it lies in removing that fear of the approaching property manager, that lack of control over a dying dill plant. It lies in creating a feeling of ownership without the actual deed.
I've been thinking about all of these things a lot lately, while reading about the convincing reasons why homeownership no longer makes as much sense as it used to. Workers are no longer tied to factories – and the bedroom communities that surround them – because no one works in factories anymore. Now people telecommute. They get transferred to Japan indefinitely. Companies no longer offer the implicit contract of lifetime employment for hard workers, and so hard workers think nothing of updating their résumés every day.
And I think about my own transience: I’ve lived in eight apartments in six cities over the past nine years. My husband and I like to pick up and move (most recently, just eight blocks down the street from our previous place) as if we were selecting a new grocery store. We have a motto as a couple, which applies equally to weekend and life plans: “We’ll see how we feel,” we say.
We have trouble thinking beyond the nearest horizon, not because we don’t like the idea of commitment, but because we want to be free to theoretically commit to anything that may come up tomorrow. What if an incredible job offer wants to relocate us to Riyadh? What if we wake up Saturday morning and decide that we’ve tired of Washington, D.C.? What if – as many of our friends have experienced – one of us loses a job?
We’re both afflicted with a dangerous daydreaming ability to envision ourselves living anywhere we step off a plane. We never take a trip and think, “It’s wonderful to visit friends in Seattle,” or “Chicago is a great place for tourists in the summertime.” We always think: What if we lived here? Maybe we should live here? We could live in Key West! My husband has never even been to Portland, but we still nurse a sneaking suspicion that we should probably be living there.
In this way, we are the quintessential young professionals of the new economy – restless knowledge workers who deal in “projects,” not “careers,” who can no sooner commit to a mortgage than we can a lifetime of desk work. Our attitude is a national epidemic. It’s harder to get a mortgage today than it was 10 years ago. But a lot of people also just don’t want one any more. At the height of the housing boom, 69 percent of American households owned their homes. Housing researcher Arthur Nelson predicted to me that number would fall to 62 percent by 2020, meaning every residence built between now and then will need to be a rental.
I haven’t been able to figure out in my own household, however, how this aversion to permanence can coexist with our rising ire about renting. And I don’t know how whole cities will accommodate this new demographic: the middle-class forever renter.
Both Nelson and Florida have floated the idea that we need some kind of hybrid rental/homeownership model, some system that decouples “renter” status from income class, while allowing professionals who would have been homeowners 20 years ago to live in a comparable setting without the millstone. Maybe we allow renters to customize their homes as if they owned them, or we enable condo owners to quickly unload property to rental agents.
Short of putting us all in houseboats, I don’t know what these hybrid homes would look like, how they’d be paid for or if anyone will be willing to build them. But I suspect the trick lies outside of the architectural and financial details, that it lies in removing that fear of the approaching property manager, that lack of control over a dying dill plant. It lies in creating a feeling of ownership without the actual deed.
by Emily Badger, CityLab | Read more:
Image: Reuters
