"Give Me a House," Says Almost No One

How did we get so far from the actual issues at play?

My best friend and I—the one whose Los Angeles road trip I recounted at the beginning of this piece over at The Bulwark—were doing our regular drive, location wherever we feel like, on my latest visit back up to New Jersey.

We’d stopped at a little park on the edge of a tiny Pennsylvania town, across the river from Milford, New Jersey, and were sitting on the bleachers over by the baseball field. For an idea of how long our friendship is, when we were kids, we wrote this series of spooky adventure stories, one of which was called “Danger in the Dugout.” That’s literally why we sat at the baseball field. I’ll probably remember this stuff after I’ve forgotten my own name.

As we sat there, looking at the empty baseball diamond, he asked me, “So what would you say if someone was able to work, like perfectly healthy physically and mentally, and just didn’t want to? But they wanted a house. Do you think they’re entitled to that just because they’re a human being, even if they refuse to do any work for themselves?”

I gave my best Burkean/Smithian answer: Housing, like food, is a practical issue, and while it may or may not be a right, I trust the market, broadly understood, to deliver that good. Declaring something a right doesn’t change the mechanisms by which it is actually produced, and fixing those issues is the key to fixing housing.

Of course, that doesn’t quite answer the question. But it also kind of does, because the other half of the answer is that viewing housing through a rights or entitlement lens is, as I put it in a piece once, like calling hotdogs more virtuous than hamburgers. I think it sort of sidesteps the question, and pulls it away from the practical, actionable realm.

But what was more interesting than the contents of his question, I said to my friend, was that he even imagined such a scenario. The idea that “people feel entitled to a nice house” is what you call a meme; not an internet meme, but a sociological meme: as the dictionary puts it, “An element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation.”

My friend understands this; he was just challenging me. He agrees that the housing market is haywire and he knows what it’s like to be a young person looking for a place to live, because he is one. But a lot of people who are comfortably housed haven’t had to think about it. And so that meme sets in as a supposed description of actual facts and behaviors.

It is repeated so widely, in fact, that it becomes a given for a lot of people that there is a large class of people who do not work and want everything given to them, and that public policy should avoid giving in to their selfish, entitled demands. Of course, such individuals may exist, but in my experience, it does not describe the vast majority of people.

What I realized was that my whole body of work—treating housing and land use as practical and urgent issues of public interest—went against the narrative that my friend had picked up simply by growing up in a house in the suburbs. There must be many people out there for whom the very idea of “housing policy” sounds vaguely radical or suspect: a way of justifying the imagined handouts and giveaways at the expense of hardworking taxpayers.

The actual flesh-and-blood people reporting on the housing situation today, finding homeownership and marriage and family to increasingly be elite luxuries, are interpreted as being the mostly-imagined “give me a house because I want one” crowd. The extent to which simply having bought a house decades ago can insulate people from the realities of America’s housing situation today is astonishing. Circumstances can cause beliefs.

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This brings me to the wineries of Napa Valley. It’s an interesting analogy, given San Francisco’s status, along with LA, as ground zero for America’s housing crisis.

Some time in the late 2000s and early 2010s, these wineries began to charge increasingly exorbitant sums for tours and tastings. My family took a vacation out there in the summer of 2004, and there were one or two wineries that charged, that I recall. The rest were free, including what were often quite in-depth tours. The tasting rooms generally attracted a good crowd, but you basically just walked up the counter and got served. In many tasting rooms, we were just about the only people, and there was a lot of time to chat with the staff. It was kind of cool. It wasn’t something everyone did, and it wasn’t completely familiar.

When my wife and I started visiting wineries in Virginia, in 2016 and 2017, we found that they all charged $10, $12, $15 per tasting (at least you often got to keep the glass.) “They must charge out here because the wine isn’t as good, and they make their money on tastings,” I said to my wife once. “We should go to Napa Valley some time, the wine is better and the tastings are free.” (Actually, Virginia wine has gotten very good, but more on that in another piece!)

So I did a little googling and thought I might start to plan a little Napa Valley trip. And…I saw things like the “Reserve Tasting” for $150, including only five wines. Or the “Family Selection,” for a comparatively reasonable $45. What?

I looked up every winery I could remember the name of, and every last one charged at least $30 or $40 for the most basic tasting, with prices spiking for tour-and-tasting combos, or wine and food paired tastings, or “Reserve” or “Special” or “Chairman’s” level tastings. Again, what happened?

Lots of things. Too many young people getting drunk on free tastings at 20 different wineries, and not buying any bottles. Too much drunk driving in the area. Crowds too large, wait times too long. Overseas tourists with large amounts of money to drop on high-status activities, and an increasing taste for European and American wine. More people were doing the “go to Napa for free wine” trip. Above all, the market. Supply and demand. You can call it greed, you can it making rational calculations.

Housing has its own set of problems, and many of them, like zoning, are not of the market, but rather distort the market. But it’s the same kind of thing. I literally could not believe what I was looking at. I think a lot of baby boomers don’t actively not care about the housing crisis; they’re just literally incredulous about it. Or to use a term from my faith, they are invincibly ignorant.

And so the culture-war meme of the entitled person (young and college-educated, poor and homeless, take your pick) demanding a nice house on the government dime is more real than the actual situation faced by anybody looking for a house in America today.

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There’s not much you can do, I guess, but be patient and realize that for many people who hold this view, their exposure to the housing issue amounts to little more than their own memories of buying a house in a different era, and whatever commentary they’ve picked up passively from news or entertainment.

I remain hopeful that there’s a large population in this country that has never really seen housing explained in practical, everyday terms, and who are only vaguely aware of what has changed in the last 20 or 30 years. They still think the metaphorical wine tastings in Napa Valley are free. Hey, until a few years ago, I did too.

That’s what I try to do here, and that’s why I keep banging away on this drum.

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Related Reading:

Housing and Deservingness

What’s a City To You?

Suburbia Was a Housing Program

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