Thanks for a great article and for all of the comments. I continue to learn much from all!
Scott

Thanks for the kind response. I appreciate the distinction you’ve making here between wealth and property but feel the ones that grasp it least are, in fact, property owners. Homes are not bought and sold for abstract principles of Stewardship and Ownership. They are bought for their use value and for their value as investments. Now I understand you’d like to change that, have a different vision of home ownership, etc.,as “property rightly understood is a necessary condition for living in community rightly understood.”

There’s a problem though. Throughout millennium of human experience their has never been this type of widespread ownership (Particularly of homes). Their is a strong tradition in many societies for customary ownership of land (Established by use), but this property is ultimately held in common and would revert back to community ownership if no longer used. There is nothing traditional about home ownership.

“My contention, on which I’ll follow up as soon as I can think of an intelligent way to say it, is that the “choice” between renting and owning, of “investing” in property or investing in other sorts of vehicles and assets is a moral or ethical choice; its ends are those of the proper order and form of a good human life rather than of profit maximization. Good ownership is part of good stewardship, it is a condition of living responsibly and thinking rightly in community.”

I think you’re absolutely correct that the decision to rent vs. buy contains a fundamentally moral core (Although other things factor in as well of course). It’s an ideological question of how you view a house and the property it rests on. Does it have value from its use (i.e. a place to live, invite friends over, etc.) or does it have a value beyond its use. Does a title, a survey, etc., infuse the house and the property with a special humanizing quality that fulfills the owner as a person? That’s the question. I look forward to the future essay.

P.S. I hope my oppositional mode doesn’t come across as mere flippancy. I think that there are a lot of good questions raised here that are thoughtfully considered and I respect that immensely. The rub is the answers. As an opposition I hope to be a convivial one.

David helpfully reminds us that, even if the American psyche has been morally deficient in terms of its understanding of property and home ownership, its vehicles of financing were better, as it were, than the people they served. Here again is the lesson of Jimmy Stewart in “It’s A Wonderful Life” (a subject to which I’ll return in a post soon). Let us pause for just a moment and contemplate the possibility that in some few instances bankers might have better princples than other people. We might then exhale and move on, recognizing that some bankers also ruined that system. Thanks, Keating!

Scott sums up the foundational problem that most FPR posts circle about; must liberty be in tension with virtue and community? Only in the liberal worldview with its saturation of binaries.

Dan interjects in the typical oppositional mode, and my inevitable reaction suggests that I am on track to become much like Fr. Andrew Greeley insofar as I may soon have no unpublished thoughts. As I wrote in “The Need for Awtarchy” here and in “Empire of Addiction, Part II,” the “investment choices” Dan proposes (and that the German and French models exemplify) are rooted in a confusion of wealth and property — a confusion that has great and often dreadful consequences. But the driving assessment this essay makes, and that other FPR essays typically make, is not simply that conceiving of property as wealth, of home as an investment vehicle as easily disposed of as a three-month Certificate of Deposit, but that private property rightly understood is a necessary condition for living in community rightly understood. My contention, on which I’ll follow up as soon as I can think of an intelligent way to say it, is that the “choice” between renting and owning, of “investing” in property or investing in other sorts of vehicles and assets is a moral or ethical choice; its ends are those of the proper order and form of a good human life rather than of profit maximization. Good ownership is part of good stewardship, it is a condition of living responsibily and thinking rightly in community. Again, I’ll return to this.

Let me conclude with noting duly M.Z.’s nits. He is right that property taxes are already a sizeable portion of the tax burden; I’m not sure anything I wrote in this essay I would right differently bearing that in mind. I’m not sure where I blamed high taxes for anyting in this essay; all I said was that taxation more fully restricted to the local level would give local officials the opportunity to design taxation policies that stress the goals of local stability and continuity of tenure. No sooner have I insisted I said nothing to which he ought to object than I find that I object to his Georgist comment. I am not sure what he means by “healthy societies,” and since one of the great evils of the liberal age has been the creation of great, removed bureaucracies officiating over the lives of vast populations, I would suggest that taxes tend to be higher when such deracinated bureaucracies are needed to administer to the consumers who once were citizens. And therefore, I would say that high taxes are likely signs not of “healthy societies” but of great masses of aggregated individuals who no longer live in a society but subsist under the management of a state power they have come to conceive of as either a benificent or tyrannical other. Of this, more anon.
As to his final point, I can scarcely think of a less apt analogy than that of a mine to a house. However, if one does not understand the renewable nature of things like home properties, especially home properties that are farmed, one might not immediately see the absurdity. Going back to my response to Dan’s point, I will try to write more systematically in a future essay precisely why ownership is a condition of proper stewardship; one does not need to own something to steward that thing, but one does need the kind of entrenchment and fidelity that a true “ownership society” makes possible in order to steward not simply one’s own things but the res publica as well. I have claimed elsewhere that ownership was a public good; I should have said that ownership makes possible the kinds of stewardship that are a public good. But, again, I’ll return to this another time. In the meantime, don’t sell your house.

Unfortunately, while there are many architects giving form to ideas of stability..Krier, Christopher Alexander…etc etc….the architect cannot provide any meaningful contribution concerning the development of stable and sustainable economies. This must come from the socio-economic and political spheres and as we all know, the current intelligentsia continues to grab the gunwales of the boat as it sinks below the waves. Think about a yahooing Slim Pickens riding the un-stuck A-Bomb down to perdition , waving his cowboy hat and then replace Slim’s head with the head of any current “leader” and you will be provided with a glimpse of our checkered denouement. This is why the various New Urbanist Schemes remain beautiful and evocative but of no real significance in addressing the deeply rooted dysfunctions of our centralizing and technocratic mongrelization as a nation. As at Prince Charle’s Poundbury and the many wonderful Duany, Plater -Zyberk & Company New Urbanist communities, they are well-designed but at basis, they remain simulacra whose chief success is providing a firm visual contrast to the oozing crud of much of our built landscape. But they are incapable of fostering stability or sustainability or even an equitable community because they remain captured by the velvety ghetto of the luxury market….a thing that is itself not quite luxury no more. Looking at the Bylaws of some of these communities, one is often confronted with a labyrinthian polemic seeming to enforce a Stalinist Super Community designed by Decorators…..or maybe a resort of the effete in a Thousand Year Reich run by Oscar Wilde…..not that this wouldn’t be highly entertaining in and of itself.

Actually, some of the more interesting development in home design is coming from a new generation of thinkers informed by the current economic collapse and using modernist forms, a revived attention to craft and an enforced economy to create new housing form that might not be traditional but are alluring places to live economically and with new concepts of sustainability. There should be room for both traditional and modern form but it requires a sea shift in mainstream thinking and right now, its all just a big stomping about in a mud puddle.

It really is a Tale of Two Cities…the best of times and the worst of times because all the seeds of a major transformation surround us . I would be more sanguine about the best finally overcoming the worst if those we call our leadership showed even a rudimentary awareness of how much bloom is off the rose. The rose aint all thats gone, even the thorns are falling off. But with stimulus, perhaps we’ll have a Cash for Spent Blossoms program or maybe a Plastic Flowers For all 50 States Law so Massachusetts can look as sprightly when viewed from 50 yards off as Mississippi does.

What of embracing the German model of less home ownership? Can one, in an existential sense, be a traditionalist renter? While a home can often be a means to self expression and fulfillment should we recognize that perhaps not everyone is Bob Vila? What of those who find home maintenance a frustrating burden and not an outlet? Is it better to own your home and contact out the maintenance and improvements or rent and spend the time that would have been spent on maintenance and improvement on pursuits that you were actually accomplished at or enjoyed more?

Lots of food for thought here. I am a happy renter who would rather place my money in investments that have better growth potential and my time in projects I find more rewarding.

In the United States, we are blessed with the foundation of private property as a basis of a free and open society. This decentralization of property rights away from the government is essential in understanding why when we organize our economies in the form of local government there is no one single way to do it. These facts are undergirded by Tocqueville and Friedman. Our mobility and choices give us a distinct advantage. But this mobility has come at a great price and our current situation is proof of it. Both articles, Mr. Wilsons as well as Dr. Sugrue have opened up a conversation about where we individually stand and where the pathway for us all is, in the aggregate.

But the model in which we have come to deal with is best explained by a beautiful passgae fron “Better Places, Better Lives,” the biography of James Rouse. It is an excellent read about the greatest economic growth this country has ever seen. It presents the man (James Rouse) as both parts of the suburban problem but also as part of the good things that were intended. Kind of a “law of unintended consequences review of this error, its players, its intent, and the good and bad of it all. This particular passage talks of the role his wife, the atypical 50’s housewife, had to say about the suburban world they lived in and which Mr. Rouse was part of building.

In their successful suburban life, his wife lamented about the isolation and fragmentation of suburbia: “The problem, she thought, was with the underlying structure of her supposedly ideal environment. Because the suburbs grew in a piecemeal fashion, everything was isolated from everything else. “I was deeply lonely,” she said. “I had to drive the children everywhere they went: to school, to doctors, to dancing class, to their friends’ houses, to shop, to a movie, to everything. The Children had no autonomy or independence, and I had no free time to do the creative things I wanted to do.”” (Olsen, 2003)

James Rouse, the creator of Columbia MD, the Baltimore Plan, and Reston, lamented that “…as mortgage bankers and developers, we have financed for others or built for our own account most of the components of a city—but they have been splattered over the countryside n the unrelated bits and pieces that mark the accidental, fractured growth of our cities.” (Olsen, 2003)