What Does Home Ownership Really Mean?

“Home should be a place to build a household and a life, a respite from the heartless world, not a pot of gold.” – Thomas J. Sugrue, The Wall Street Journal, August 15-16, 2009

Today’s Wall Street Journal carries an article by Penn professor Thomas J. Sugrue suggesting that in light of what we know about the current foreclosure crisis, it’s high time our government stopped promoting home ownership as the ideal, while stigmatizing renters.

Until age nine, when my parents bought a row house in Forest Hills with help from my grandparents, we lived in rental apartments in Queens. In retrospect it amuses me that people in Queens, where home ownership was the exception rather than the norm, used to talk of living in a “private house,” I don’t recall any stigma about rentals, provided the rentals were in well-kept buildings.

As a nine year old in Forest Hills, I envied the kids who lived in rental apartments in buildings with balconies, uniformed doormen, and art deco lobbies. My memories include dinners at the home of an only child named Evelyn born to a beautiful blonde named Greta. Greta impressed me with her ability to exhale cigarette smoke through her nose or sometimes with a mere flick of her tongue.

The bedroom I grudgingly shared with my sister Phyllis, in our three bedroom house had two mismatched beds and one beige Steelcase desk. By contrast, Evelyn’s room had been done by an interior designer. In addition to having a Murphy bed that could swing out from the wall, the room had a wicker pole decorated with stuffed monkeys wrapped around it, and a caged parakeet.

Our house had a pine-paneled, finished basement with an enormous u-shaped banquette, a lovely bar, and indirect lighting in rainbow colors, which in theory seemed pretty cool as a play area. Still it seemed more fun playing in Evelyn’s bedroom.

Evelyn’s father was a used car dealer, and during the summers when she wasn’t sent to an expensive overnight camp, she and her mom traveled to Europe. The fact that they were renting rather than owning reflected personal choice rather than being unable to afford a house, and certainly conveyed no stigma.

My parents sold the house after I got married and Phyllis went off to Bryn Mawr. Like many empty nesters in Queens, their dream was living in Manhattan. Although their house sold within a week, they swore they would never buy again because they loved the freedom of being able to move at will. They lived in that first Greenwich Village apartment for two years, before moving on to another with beautiful views of the Manhattan skyline and three different bridges.

I don’t think I sensed any stigma about being a renter until I began living in Boston, where renting seemed acceptable for students and newly-weds but not for families or singles with established careers. One of my dearest friends, a Bostonian through and through, constantly laments the fact that her 40 something, single son, who does very well in venture capital, chooses to split his time between two rentals. One is in Manhattan and the other overlooks the beach in Santa Monica. To hear her tell it, he’s “throwing money out the window” by renting.

As a homeowner myself, I smile knowingly when I read what Wall Street Journal columnist, Neal Templin, otherwise known as Cheapskate, or a former WSJ columnist, Jonathan Clements, have said about home ownership. Their message is that after factoring in maintenance and home improvements, home ownership should be seen as providing a place to live rather than an investment opportunity.

My friend would discount the columns because I don’t think her belief in the importance of home ownership is really about the economics. Deep down, I think she and others associate renting with shiftiness, a generalized lack of stability in one’s life, or a refusal to grow up.

We bought our first house after our landlord, Freddie, came upstairs to say he needed our apartment because his daughter was moving back home with her little boy. But I never thought of the house purchase being about anything other than needing a place to live, in a neighborhood with well-maintained homes and a good school district with easy proximity to Boston.

Home ownership, whether it’s a standalone house or a condo in a building with several other units, allows us the delusion of having control over something sacred. Though I have no plans to sell my condo, I have no expectation that it will ever sell for more than what I paid two and half years ago. Yet at the end of each workday I have the comfort of knowing I can return to a home I cherish in a neighborhood I love.