Think back to earlier this decade. If you have a good memory, you’d remember that there was a video that had been put out by a very powerful and influential organization—years earlier actually—that finally caused quite a furor. The video in question was the infamous “8 Predictions For The World In 2030,” put out by the even more infamous World Economic Forum. Here’s a question for you. Do you remember the first of eight things listed and discussed in that video? “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.” And let the outrage commence. But seriously, people were rightly enraged by that sentiment. “You think you’re going to make us permanent renters? Well, screw you then, buddy.”
And as easy as it is to agree with that sentiment—because it’s correct—the sentiment hasn’t prevented us from heading down the road towards being permanent renters. Or, at least, prevented us from providing the ammunition for making a strong argument that that is happening. Case in point, the median age for a first-time homebuyer in the United States is around 40 (National Association of Realtors). This is one of the most important statistics about our country right now. It should have everybody’s attention because it’s an “alarm bells are ringing” type of statistic. And it’s that type of statistic because the American Dream doesn’t work without feasible potential for mass property ownership or actual mass property ownership.
Just think about it. Picture an image in your head representative of the American Dream. What does that image look like? It probably looks like a family—mom, dad, the kids, and the dog—in front of their house with a white picket fence. The stereotypical image of the 1950s, right?
And that’s not to simply glamorize the 1950s because trying to replicate the 1950s shouldn’t be the goal. But the fact that the family and the house are central to that image is important to note. Why? Well, to answer that, let’s embark on a little detour.
Gallup put out a poll earlier in the year based on data collected last year showing how Americans are split on what defines the American Dream for them. In the poll, Americans are split over whether opportunity or stability defines the American Dream. And not to pick too much on Gallup, but breaking the American Dream down into either opportunity or stability wasn’t a smart choice. If the answer is opportunity, the opportunity to do what? Just harboring a guess here, but it’s likely safe to assume an answer along the lines of “The opportunity to be successful” would be a common answer to that question. But yet again, that answer leaves us with another question: Successful for what purposes? See, what I’m trying to get at here is that if we’re smart and want long-term flourishing for as many Americans as possible, then the answer to the original question is the opportunity to achieve stability. And what two things feature prominently in what is typically classified as stability? Having a family and owning a home. Owning a home—and being steadily employed—are what provide material stability for the family. And that stability opens up future opportunity. When the American Dream works, the relationship between opportunity and stability is both harmonious and cyclical, or at least, people have the freedom to make it so.
And this gets us to one of the prominent reasons—a more materially focused reason—as to why property ownership is so important.
Traditionally, in the United States, owning property has equaled wealth, specifically, generational wealth (Forbes). Sure, this wasn’t guaranteed; there seem to be financially illiterate people in all families, people who end up making incredibly foolish decisions. And there’s always the possibility for unforeseen events to run up expenses, cutting deeply into peoples’ coffers. But, in general, the rule has been property ownership equals wealth. And this is a great rule, so long as each successive generation has relative ease breaking into the housing market.
Oh, and there it is. Forgive the cliche, but “Houston, we have a problem.” Our young people aren’t breaking into the housing market, hence the aforementioned statistic regarding the current median age for first-time homebuyers. This fact begs a question: How are younger Americans supposed to build generational wealth if they can’t purchase homes? Well, that’s effectively a rhetorical question because the answer is self-explanatory. They’re not going to build generational wealth. At the very least, it is highly unlikely. And this explains, from a material standpoint, why younger Americans have, to put it nicely, a lapsed faith regarding the American Dream.
Now, before I move on, I’m going to go on a bit of a diatribe here. This might not be the best place in this piece for it, and the diatribe itself might not have a place in this piece at all, but I’m going to say all of this anyway because I just mentioned younger Americans.
I put out a piece last month effectively saying that simply screaming, “Socialism bad!”—which is what plenty of talking heads on the Right were doing in reference to Mamdani—will get us socialism. In other words, just doing that is a terrible political strategy. Expressing that was my intent with that piece. And I still agree with that sentiment overall. But I also realized in hindsight that some of what I said in that piece regarding affordability struggles and, for lack of a better phrase, helping our youth craft a better start in life could be viewed as simply playing the blame game without cause or, more importantly, introspection, which is something I try, not always successfully, to avoid. So I’m going to say some things to correct that lack of introspection.
To my fellow young people, yes, there’s a lot of crap out there—bad policy, overarching economic trends and happenings, housing shortages and competition for said housing with corporations and illegal immigrants, which is also a major problem—that are out of our control. And we can gripe about these things, sometimes justifiably so. But at the same time, not all of our generation’s affordability issues are due to external factors. Let’s be honest here. Some or most of them are probably due to our own spending decisions. Are you spending money on “stuff” even though your financial situation is tight? If so, then don’t do that; that’s a foolish decision. Don’t be so materialistic. Which is an ironic thing to say in a piece regarding the importance of property, but I digress. Now that that’s been said, we can move on.
Even though property ownership is important in a material sense, that’s not the only reason it’s important. There is also a societally important reason for the necessity of property ownership. Although, to be fair, this reason, too, has material implications.
Property ownership is also vitally important in that it represents the sowing of roots in a community. An owner of property in the community is going to be incentivized to behave differently than someone who is a renter because, when you buy a house, what you’re essentially saying is, “I’m now fully invested in this community.” That’s not necessarily the case with a renter because they are able to leave the community with much greater ease. Sure, a renter’s agreement or a lease doubtlessly exists and has to be dealt with prior to the renter leaving, but an agreement or lease is much simpler to get out of than the process of selling a house, which represents leaving the community for the property owner.
If a community goes to crap, the owner is going to have a much more difficult time selling the house at a profit depending on when the house was bought. So for example, Boomers and Gen Xers can sell their homes at a profit regardless because of a likely combination of having bought the house some time ago and the housing market now being through the roof. But the same cannot be said for a millennial or Zoomer who’s been fortunate enough to break into the housing market because that was a more recent development in their lives. Moreover, if a community has gone to crap, the owner may not be able to sell the house at all. So when you have a community mostly consisting of property owners, there’s extra incentive on the part of the residents in that community to be proactive citizens in ensuring their community remains a desirable destination for people to sow their own roots in the future.
And there’s doubtless more reasons as to why property is important; I just picked two immediate, surface-level reasons. I didn’t even get into the weeds—come on, I’m not writing a book here. But all kidding aside, there’s an even better reason that explains the importance of property ownership by private individual citizens. And that reason can be found in a rather self-explanatory question, a question with which I’m going to leave you: Do we really want to be giving the World Economic Forum what it wants?
Sources:
https://archive.org/details/8-predictions-for-the-world-in-2030
https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics/research-reports/highlights-from-the-profile-of-home-buyers-and-sellers
https://news.gallup.com/poll/693083/americans-split-meaning-american-dream.aspx
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrejeanpierre/2024/07/31/owning-your-future-how-homeownership-is-stable-path-to-wealth/