If You Live In a Castle...

Thoughts on the subtle ideology of homeownership

I had a piece in Discourse Magazine recently thinking, again, about this question of whether homeownership makes people more “responsible” in some sense. And, further, whether this alleged and obviously good sense of responsibility is separable from the paranoia that homeownership seems to create in some people. My headline kind of says it all: “If You Live in a Castle, Does Everything Feel Like a Siege?”

There are always a few different threads in these pieces I write, and always a little more to say—which, by way of general introduction, is why I started this newsletter and why it’s called “The Deleted Scenes.”

One of the bits that seemed to get some attention is this:

Sometimes urbanites talk about meeting dates on the subway, or crying on the bus. They think of riding transit as spending a moment in the city’s great big living room. Suburbanites do those things in the car. They insulate themselves within it. The design of suburban life creates and reinforces a kind of protective privacy.

Is this a fear of potential loss? I wrote once, “Maybe how you handle having things to lose is a test of your character.” Is it possible to resist that homeowner’s suspicion? Or is that asking people to do something impossible? And if it is impossible, what does that say about the supposed virtues of ownership?

I remember, when I moved to the D.C. area for grad school, taking the Metro into the city and sort of realizing, probably for the first time, huh, transit and cities aren’t lefty things or ideological things. Cities need public transit. All of the politics around these things come after the basic realities. In some ways what started me on being an urbanist was simply realizing, as an adult, that cities were not the war zones you heard about in suburbia.

The bit about cars and transit were an aside that illustrates the psychology of homeownership, but the car and the house are similar things. I think, looking at myself and speaking for myself, that owning an actual house makes me more responsible in some ways and more paranoid of other people. I think it requires a certain maturity, but I’m not sure that understanding of maturity is really a good one.

There’s this very subtle, very deep-seated idea that young people who live in cities or urban environments are essentially lazy. That you haven’t really fully grown up until you buy a car and move to the suburbs. Ross Douthat made the upmarket version of this argument last year, when he concluded in a semi-review of Matthew Crawford’s Why We Drive:

If you do not drive your neighborhood or region, what form of adult mastery and knowledge are you seeking in its place? If you do not drive your country’s highways and byways, what path do you have to a nonvirtual experience of the America beyond your class and tribe and bubble?

I reviewed Crawford’s book too; my conclusion was a little different. Douthat’s use of the word “adult” is telling, as was Crawford’s characterization of the bicycle as the “ultimate childhood conveyance.” This is insulting, both to urbanites, and to people’s intelligence generally.

But back to the point. One thing I think about is how a house ties you to a physical place in a way that an apartment doesn’t. Suddenly the weather matters. Too much rain, go check the basement for water. Not enough rain, the grass and garden need watering. You have multiple doors to lock and check; no more key-carding into a nice lobby. The only noise in my old apartment—managed by a company, and in a newish building, I should note—was a party down the hall. You didn’t have to wonder if you had mice in the drop ceiling of the cheaply finished basement.

You can no longer just float effortlessly between the house and the outside, as if it were a permeable membrane; the house exerts a certain domestic gravitational pull. This can help you to cultivate a lot of good habits, or it can make you aware, as I noted, of how much you have to lose. It can force you to root yourself, or it can waste your time and pull you away from much more valuable kinds of rootedness or cultivating of community. I’ve learned a lot of home improvement and DIY skills, but I’ve spent a lot of time on mundane stuff inside. Homeownership grows your world and shrinks it. I do more, and can take more. But I’m not sure how much virtue there is in “I can’t go out tonight, I have to stay home in case the basement floods or a tree falls on the house.”

This was how I concluded this all in the piece: “Perhaps you’re hearing echoes of ‘You will own nothing and be happy.’ But I’ve got someone else’s words bouncing around in my head: ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’”

Since housing/land use and transportation are so related—really, almost, the same thing—I’ve also written this about cars. Now this all might sound very abstract and theoretical. But what actually sparked this piece was something other than theory—actual little interactions that made me realize that having the “skin in the game” of homeownership made me more concerned about little risks or things that seemed like they might be risks. I guess I’m wondering whether the city and its trappings are pro-social in their essence, and if the car and suburbia are anti-social in their essence.

That’s the real question I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. And if you have anything to say on that, leave a comment!

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Related Reading:

Homeownership, Family, and Competing Responsibilities

Apartments, Ownership, and Responsibility

More on Housing and Generational Divides

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