Building on yesterday’s post regarding the growing homeownership rate of millennials, I wonder: how much do Americans today feel they deserve to be able to own a home? It is one thing to make a choice to buy a property, it is another to feel that the economic and social conditions render this difficult or impossible. Here are several factors complicating this issue:
The American social contract includes a house. Many Americans expect they should be able to purchase a home. I would guess that Americans and the American structures will continue to pursue and promote homeownership, even when it might be difficult. A big change might require a significant event or a steady long-term process moving toward different housing preferences and possibilities.
The first part of the title of the post works two ways: I somehow missed this news earlier this year and the absolute number of the homeownership rate for millennials may matter less than how it compares to previous generations.
The nation’s largest generation made the jump to a homeowner majority last year, reaching more than 18 million, according to a recent report from Rent Café.
Rent Café’s report found that 51.5 percent of millennials now own a home. This population, which consists of those born between 1981 and 1996, added seven million homeowners in the previous five years alone…
Millennials became a homeowner majority generation when the average member was 34 years old while Gen X reached the milestone by 32 and baby boomers by 33…
Sky high mortgage rates also pushed many buyers out of the market and back toward renting. Rent Café’s report showed millennials are still the dominant renter generation in 2022
It takes time in life to develop the resources and connections to achieve homeownership. Since owning a home is an American ideal, it can serve as a marker of how successful Americans are.
Thus, the data cites above provides some hints regarding millennials. They were slightly older than the two previous generations for the average age for becoming a homeowner. Millennials have more renters than previous generations.
Trends could change in the future. Economic conditions could again become more favorable. New forms of housing options may develop. New policies could help promote homeownership.
However, this narrative is going pretty strong for the moment: millennials have had a harder time pursuing this basic marker of American success. And because the American dream is supposed to be attainable, this will have implications for discussions, policies, and communities.
Social media platforms are having a field day with microapartments and tiny homes like Mr. Marshall’s, breathing life into the curiosity about that way of living. The small spaces have captivated viewers, whether they are responding to soaring housing prices or to a boundary-pushing alternate lifestyle, as seen on platforms like the Never Too Small YouTube channel. But while there is no precise count on the number of tiny homes and microapartments on the market, the attention on social media has not necessarily made viewers beat a path in droves to move in, perhaps because the spaces sometimes can be a pain to live in…
Viewers of microapartment videos are like visitors to the Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary in San Francisco Bay who “get inside of a cell and have the door closed,” said Karen North, a professor of digital social media at the University of Southern California.
Social media users want to experience what it’s like at the “anomalously small end” of the housing scale, she explained…
Pablo J. Boczkowski, a professor of communications studies at Northwestern University, said that despite the belief that new technologies have a powerful influence, millions of clicks don’t translate into people making a wholesale lifestyle change.
Perhaps it will take a long term social media effort for people to adopt tiny homes? What could be curiosity at the beginning could become normalized as more and more people are exposed to popular images. If such tiny homes are still drawing a lot of views and engagement in a few years, could this add up to something?
Still, I would not be surprised if more tiny or smaller residences attract social media hits in the coming years. If under 100 or 200 square feet is too small, could more housing options at 200-500 feet prove attractive in real life and on smartphones?
With locations in Palo Alto, San Francisco and Bakersfield, Brownstone Shared Housing has converted two homes and an office space into dwellings for dozens of people, with rents ranging from $500 to $900 per month.
The basic pods are a very cozy 3.5 feet wide and 4 feet tall, just big enough to fit a twin mattress. They feature amenities such as charging stations, LED lights and individual climate control systems.
Residents share bathrooms and utilize storage lockers for their belongings, most of which won’t fit into the pods.
And even though $500 to $900 may sound like a lot for such limited space, the rates are far cheaper than most alternatives on the traditional rental market.
In Bakersfield, the median studio apartment rents for $995, according to Zillow. In San Francisco, the figure is $2,200. And in Palo Alto, the median studio rents for $2,300.
Several thoughts in response:
I suspect this kind of housing would appeal to particular audiences and not others.
Is it possible to scale this up? At some point, these might appear to be close to single room occupancy that used to be more common in many cities.
How does zoning work within local municipalities? Would the density levels be acceptable to local officials and residents?
While this might be an innovative way to address the cost of housing, how does this fit with or help spur larger-scale changes that would make affordable housing available to more people?
West Chicago is home to the county’s only garbage-transfer station — an in-between location before waste is hauled to a landfill. Earlier this year, city officials gave the green light to add a second facility that would be run by trash hauler LRS and bring 650 tons of solid waste a day and air pollution from hundreds of large garbage and semi-trailer trucks weekly to the city of 25,000…
On Thursday, lawyers for Alcántar-Garcia will argue to state officials that the trash facility should be blocked.
The Illinois Pollution Control Board has the final say in the matter, and a panel of Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s appointees will be asked to decide whether the city of West Chicago met all the criteria to determine that the new garbage site will not harm the health of nearby residents. That final decision is expected early next year.
West Chicago is around half Latino, and that raises questions for Alcántar-Garcia’s legal team as to why it is the only DuPage County community targeted for two of these waste sites. Other municipalities, including those that are largely white and affluent, would benefit.
Perhaps a thought experiment might shed some light on this problem. Imagine a metropolitan region where land uses were randomly distributed. The land uses suburbanites tend not to like, those that generate noise, traffic, and are perceived to threaten property values are randomly placed. Airports, garbage facilities, apartments, drug treatment facilities, railroad tracks, warehouses, and more are spread out. What would happen?
Assuming this is a blank landscape beyond these land uses, where would development pop up? Those with resources and influence might just happen to live and congregate in places away from those land uses. If locations are at least in part determined by the ability to purchase and develop land, those with more resources can better compete for desirable land. And those with fewer options might live closer to those less desirable land uses.
Of course, we do not have random metropolitan landscapes or centralized bodies that could make wise choices about where less desirable but necessary land uses should go. Instead, we have ongoing patterns by race, social class, and durable local history that help guide land uses to certain locations and not others.
After a period of rain and wind in our area, I noticed that leaves are starting to fall from the trees. How will suburbanites respond to this threat or opportunity for their lawns this fall and in the years to come?
The general trend with American lawns is to leave them spotless, free of leaves, weeds, and other obstructions. Will this continue in the future? Some thoughts:
-There is more interest in battery-powered lawn equipment so clearing the lawn with a gas blower and gas mower may be on the wane. Using electric versions of these tools means clearing leaves will be quieter. This could also limit pollution.
-Or, if people do not want to use energy from gas or battery equipment, perhaps raking will be back in vogue.
-An alternative to both options above is that people could let the leaves stay on the lawn. This has benefits for the lawn as leaves break down. This goes against the spotless ideal of the American lawn but it requires no work and has benefits for the environment.
The well-tended lawn ideal with all or most leaves cleared will likely stick around for a while. Yet, there is a chance that shifts in practice and ideology about lawns changes how Americans treat leaves that come down each year.
Wildfires are increasing but McMansion developments are underway in brushland.
McMansions have long been connected to environmental concerns. This includes their presence within sprawling suburbs and neighborhoods where driving is necessary and a lot of land is used. It includes the materials required for each home and yard. It includes the use of resources to heat and light such homes.
The concern expressed above is more specific. McMansions are linked to wildfires and brushland. This suggests these homes are being built in places where they should not be built or in places that are vulnerable to wildfires. If McMansions were not in these locations, wildfires would affect fewer people.
When school started in our area in mid-August, I noticed more signs on streets near schools asking drivers to slow down and pay attention because children are present. But, we are now weeks past this and I wonder at what speeds drivers are going.
I am guessing the signs had limited effect, if any at all. School zones may be important to a few drivers, particularly with increased vehicular and pedestrian traffic at certain times in the morning and afternoon..
Many communities struggle with people driving fast through residential streets with speed limits of 20-30 mph. These suburban roads can often be wide, fairly straight, and have limited obstacles on the sides. Even the possibilities of children being present may not be enough to
Communities have multiple techniques to try to address this. There are warning signs, signs that flash the speed of oncoming drivers, and traffic control devices like speed bumps. The presence of crossing guards on foot and/or police vehicles can help reinforce the need to slow down.
As long as driving is the dominant mode of transportation and communities prioritize the fast flow of cars, it will be hard to slow down drivers around schools. Fewer students walk or bike to school than in the past but those who do and those who might if it could be safer would benefit from safer pathways.
In the early years of the new millennium, internet theorists and tech startups were fixated on the long tail, the idea, popularized by a 2004 Wired article and subsequent book, that on-demand manufacturing and digital distribution would disrupt the winner-take-all logic of monopoly capitalism and allow businesses to profit by making a nigh-infinite variety of products available to any audience, no matter how small. You could sell one book to a million people, but you could also sell them a million different books, especially once you were freed from the storage constraints of a brick-and-mortar store. The problem is that this theory, that “the future of business is selling less of more,” turned out to be, at least in some cases, almost exactly wrong. Faced with the internet’s overwhelming range of choices, people retreat to the familiar, or flock to the latest TikTok trend. In a 2018 study, researchers found that increasing the number of available movies by a mere 1,000 titles decreased the market share occupied by the bottom 1 percent of DVDs—the ones the long-tail effect should benefit most—by more than 20 percent. Faced with even more options, people just gave up entirely. “When instead of 20,000 DVDs you can choose from 50,000 or 100,000 or 1 million,” the study’s co-author, Wharton professor Serguei Netessine, explained, “what happens is demand for all movies goes down.”…
Netflix won’t say how many movies are on the service at any given time, but estimates put it at fewer than 4,000, less than a hundredth of the vast universe it once provided. Where Netflix’s disc-by-mail service promised you could watch anything you wanted, its streaming incarnation merely promises that you’ll always be able to watch something. In the DVD era, Netflix’s queue would not only show you what was available but what wasn’t—if a disc ended up lost or damaged, the title would be grayed out and it would sink to the bottom of the page. But if a title on your list leaves the site, as dozens do every month, it just disappears: off of Netflix, out of mind. I rarely look at my list at all these days, but when I do, I’m vaguely annoyed that it’s full of things I’ve already watched, as if one time through Army of the Dead wasn’t enough. It’s no longer an agenda, something to be meticulously arranged and checked off one item at a time. (The cinephiles have Letterboxd for that now.) It’s just a pile of stuff.
When Hollywood’s legacy conglomerates launched their own streaming services in 2020, they followed Netflix’s initial model: one low price for a mountain of content. For less than $10 a month, you could access every movie Disney ever made, plus all the Marvels and NatGeo specials you could stuff your eyeballs with. Twice that, and HBO Max would serve up a vast trove of Hollywood history, from Batman to Casablanca, not to mention Game of Thrones and Friends. But they followed Netflix’s arc at an accelerated clip. Two and a half years after HBO Max launched, it started pulling down titles by the fistful, and six months later, Disney+ and Hulu followed suit. “This whole idea of warehousing content on Max, on a streaming platform, in retrospect is incomprehensible,” the CFO of HBO’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, recently told investors. “A small percentage of titles really drives the vast majority of viewership and engagement.” Any title outside that small percentage is at risk of being removed, and while a movie or a TV show that went off the air might once have still been available on disc at your local video store, now, not even the people who create the content own their own copies.
The unchecked sluice of streaming can make it seem like you’ll never run out of things to watch, but that doesn’t mean you can watch anything you want to. When the director William Friedkin died last month, many people were unpleasantly surprised to find his cult favorite To Live and Die in L.A. unavailable to stream at any price, even as a digital rental or purchase. The movie is available on Blu-ray, but while Netflix once had a copy in its library of discs, they didn’t in August. (My local library, at least, does.) In the streaming era, we’ve come to accept such artistic lacunae as a way of life, and if To Live and Die in L.A. isn’t available, you can still watch The Exorcist and The French Connection—not to mention Sorcerer and Cruising and Killer Joe. How much William Friedkin does one person need, anyway?
This sounds like the ongoing issue facing the culture industries: how do they know what will be a hit and which products generate the most interest and money? In the world of movies, TV shows, books, music, and similar media, it is hard to know what viewers, readers, and consumers might find worth their time. Thus, these industries produce hundreds and thousands of options each year. A small group will generate a lot of money and help make the rest of the production possible.
Netflix offered a different possibility: the ability to profit from the edges of the catalog. By being the place where movie viewers could find particular options, they could offer a unique product. Other Internet-based companies, such as Amazon, could offer similar opportunities.
But it sounds like Netflix does not think it profits enough from the long tail. The goal is to make a smaller catalog available and focus on finding the big hits. If this is the plan moving forward, the culture industries continue on a long term path: try to crack the code on what becomes a hit and funnel resources to similar products.
I recently read through some social media discussion of this particular phrase: “renting is throwing away money.” As someone who studies suburbs and housing, what do people mean in the United States with this phrase? Here are a few dimensions of this and some historical and social context:
However, homeownership in the United States is not just about making money. Homeownership signals something involving status, social class, and a commitment to a community. Homeowners have made it. Their ability to purchase a home is a signal of their industriousness and commitment to a community. They may raise a family there. Yes, they can sell the home down the road but they have bought into a particular place and put their money into a particular community. This is less about a personal return on investment and more of a marker of the homeowner and their ties to their neighbors and neighborhood.
Summing up: in an era with a hyperfocus on investment, homeownership can be viewed as a better long-term return on investment than renting. Additionally, Americans often view homeownership as more virtuous and more desirable for community life than renting. Put these together and there are long-standing concerns regarding renting and apartments.
Legally Sociable 