Increasingly, people are finding themselves housed but not homed.
Homeownership has declined steeply since the mid-2000s, with more and more folks preferring to rent. The latest signal of this shift was the statistic that 1 in 7 recently sold homes were sold to investment firms, who (in the short term at least) plan to play landlord.
For the modern cosmopolitan, it may be difficult to find fault in a world with fewer owner-occupied homes. Renting, after all, provides individuals with a degree of geographic freedom that homeowners could only dream of.
Not digging the proto-communistic musings of New York? Just wait for your lease to expire and split to Florida, Idaho, or some other halfway decent state. Mr. Right goes wrong, some other job beckons, or your whimsy simply switches from plains to mountains to shorelines? Just give 30 days’ notice and move on.
What is the promise of modernity if not freedom from any entangling alliances to anything?
It is an appealing prospect, to be sure, but it’s also demonstrably harmful to social cohesion.
Owning a home, a physical place tied to an individual both emotionally and economically, provides strong incentives for people to stand by and deal with the hand being dealt to their community.
Though this may sound like an unnecessary burden to bear, in reality, it is part of what makes America great.
Knowing that the well-being of yourself and your children is tied to the well-being of those around you spurs one to be a good neighbor and an active participant in local civic life. Positive traits such as these have been in short supply as of late.
We could use more people attending school board meetings, more neighborhood barbecues inundated with cringeworthy jokes and overcooked burgers, and more churches tied together by multiple generations of parishioners. Being invested in one place by having a home motivates people to look after the health of their locality and those who inhabit it. Surely, this is preferable to living among a gaggle of rootless internationalists who would leave it all behind for a slightly flashier job title.
Community is irreplaceable; most anyone who grew up in a small town will tell you as much. As homeownership becomes less common, so will the bonds that hold so many collections of people together.
