The American Nightmare – A Place to Call “Home”

My parents bought two houses in their lives, one soon after I was born and then another, over ten years later. In between, we lived in a rent-controlled apartment in the Bronx, but Dad always dreamed of returning to the land of front lawns and shrubbery. We left that first house rather quickly (a long story for another time), so my formative years were filled with concrete playgrounds and nosy landlords and four-flight climbs to use the bathroom. Sometimes, I didn’t make it. I also failed to develop the desire to own a piece of the dream that haunted my father and drove him to always work two jobs and treat every penny as if it were his last.


As a confirmed renter (okay, I owned a house when I was married, but that’s another tedious tale), I look upon my property-owning acquaintances as curious beings; they constantly complain about the money and effort required to maintain their biggest investment, yet take pride in the nature of their circumstance. For them, living in a house where the deed features their name (along with that of the mortgage lender) seems to validate their acceptance of our country’s basic ethos; a house with a yard for the kids to play in and a porch in the front from which to wave hello to passing neighbors.


Then there’s the now laughable tenet that real estate is the safest of investments. My parents have realized a 2,000 per cent appreciation of their property over the past 43 years, yet stand queasy about trading in their equity for fear of being strangled by over-priced assisted living facilities. It appears that rising residential values only pay out if you die as soon as the mortgage is paid off. Otherwise, a replacement for the home one is leaving will eat up most, if not all, of the supposed gain.


So, this is the American Dream … to labor the land for a lifetime, only to find that the sum value is equal to that of a sharecropper? How many of your friends bought houses near the peak of the boom, only to find themselves swamped by a mortgage that towers over the structure it was meant to support? How many have made the difficult decision to walk away, rather than continue to pay an unsympathetic mortgagor? How will the market ever stabilize with more and more distressed properties appearing every day on the asset sheets of already teetering lending institutions? This isn’t a dream, unless you’re Freddy Krueger.


The American ideal of the house with the white picket fence and homespun sheets drying in the backyard breeze has always been, to my mind, a load of crap. We all need a roof over our heads and a place to call home. But where does it say that you need to pay such a dear price in order to satisfy that need? Americans have been fooled by the banks for a century into believing that their children wouldn’t grow straight and tall unless they were raised in a place just so. In acting on that belief, we have now come to the point where the accumulated wealth in personal properties is blowing away like so much topsoil in a dust storm. The banks can’t help – the few that would are gone or swallowed up and the remaining behemoths can continue to absorb the losses with the help of our government.


That’s the final irony in all of it; that the government of the people and by the people can watch all those citizens perish from their earth, powerless to intervene on their behalf. It is so much easier to assist a handful of publicly-traded financial institutions, at least from a bookkeeping standpoint, than to perpetuate the false dreams of a bygone America.