Little boxes on the hillside Little boxes made of ticky tacky Little boxes on the hillside Little boxes all the same
The rest of the song then describes the people who live in these homes and the ways they follow the same paths.
This song borrows the imagery of new suburban construction – a lot of similar looking homes (“little boxes”) emerging out of open spaces outside cities – to argue the communities and people within are falling into patterns of conformity. This was a common argument in the 1950s and 1960s: suburbanites thought they were achieving the American Dream but they were really getting a dull and common life. Instead of becoming individuals or households that had made it, they were sold a bill of goods.
Even as Seeger’s song became a hit (reaching #70 on the charts), many Americans did not appear to be swayed by this song. They continued to move to the suburbs in large numbers for subsequent decades. Perhaps they might even admit there is conformity in the suburbs in the houses and social life – and they might be okay with that.
If home is “where the heart is” or “wherever I’m with you,” I should be fine with my mom moving anywhere—especially to a nearby apartment, as she plans to, where she’ll doubtless have a place for me to sleep whenever I want. Instead, any mention of a future sale prompts an ache akin to the homesickness I felt as a kid at summer camp—except that now I ache for my future self. I imagine her standing outside that suburban New Jersey house, pacing back and forth, insisting that some piece of her remains in this one edifice on a certain corner of a specific street, even though she hasn’t lived there for decades…
Going home can be a much more effective way to time travel. Our past isn’t just preserved in knickknacks and memorabilia; it lingers in the spaces we once occupied. When we talk about our experiences, we often focus, understandably, on the people who’ve shaped us, and we “treat the physical environment like a backdrop,” Lynne Manzo, a landscape-architecture professor at the University of Washington, told me. But setting can be its own character; it colors our day-to-day, and we endow it with agency and meaning. If social interactions and relationships are the bricks constructing our identities, our surroundings are the scaffolding.
Setting is also central to how we remember. Recalling events (as opposed to information) involves “episodic memory,” which is deeply tied to location. Many researchers, in fact, believe that episodic memory evolved to help us physically orient ourselves in the world. (One very sad study—partial title: “Implications for Strandings”—found that some sea lions with damage to the hippocampus, the hub of episodic memory, get lost and wander ashore.) When you’re in a given space, your brain tends to “pull up the relevant memories” that happened there—even ones that have long been dormant, Charan Ranganath, a neuroscientist and the author of Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold On to What Matters, told me. People remembering a specific moment can even demonstrate what Ranganath called a “reboot” of the brain-activity patterns they showed during the original event.
But without the physical space to visit, it can be hard to mentally transport yourself back. When the 19th-century French writer Stendhal wrote his memoir The Life of Henry Brulard, detailing a difficult and lonely childhood, he drew the places of his youth again and again, in an obsessive attempt to spur his memory. “Winding staircase—Large, cheerless courtyard—Magnificent inlaid chest-of-drawers surmounted by a clock,” he scrawled under a sketch, as if the incantation might apparate him to his grandfather’s imposing Grenoble townhouse. Yet his recollection remained, as he put it, like a fresco, solid for stretches and elsewhere crumbling apart.
I am interested here in the powerful connection to a suburban home. Little is said about this home that might differentiate it from other New Jersey suburban homes. There are millions of Americans who could have similar positive memories about their suburban homes.
At the same time, critics of suburbs argue these homes are not worth much. They are cookie-cutter. Tract homes. Poor quality. Big but empty of meaning and purpose.
We are physical beings whose memories and emotions are tied to particular places. It is easy in our current age to forget our embodied lives amid social media, travel, and ideas.
The suburban homes that might look from the outside to be similar can also be settings where millions of people develop important memories in their life.
When suburbs build apartments or condos in their downtowns, who do they envision living there? A quote from suburban leader provides a hint as I have seen similar sentiments across suburban downtowns:
Suess said there’s a high demand for apartment space in the downtown areas and the suburbs in particular.
“The attraction of this I think is very much towards empty nesters,” Suess said. “I think it’s towards young professionals starting out and, again, folks who want to be in the downtown area.”
That is a very specific set of people. Presumably, these are people with the resources available to live in nicer apartments near a lot of suburban amenities.
At the same time, highlighting these groups also reinforces the importance of single-family homes in suburban communities. Empty nesters are ones who might have owned a home for years and raised kids there but now are looking for a change from maintaining a home. Young professionals are just starting out and perhaps they do not yet have the resources to be homeowners for the first time.
Often, suburbanites do not like apartments and/or the people who might live there. But the right apartments in a downtown setting can attract certain residents – the ones named above – and contribute to a denser, walkable, thriving downtown.
Since he started the account in December 2020, it has exploded into a social media phenomenon, amassing more than 4 million followers across the major social media platforms and spinning off an HGTV show that debuts next month with Mezrahi as executive producer. Throughout it all, Mezrahi’s recipe has remained mostly unchanged: Find the zaniest homes on the market – castle-themed mansions with full drawbridges, for example – then blast them out to the internet with a bit of pithy commentary, and watch the clicks, likes and shares pile up. The simplicity of the premise is part of the brilliance; it’s the result of the decade-plus that Mezrahi spent charting the internet’s fascinations as social media director for BuzzFeed.
Does all this interest in houses translate into money?
None of this, however, was enough to save Mezrahi at BuzzFeed. The now-struggling company laid him off last spring. He had survived previous cuts, “but eventually you don’t last, especially as a strategist kind of person,” Mezrahi says. Already, he’d been mulling the prospect of leaving the full-time gig to focus entirely on his personal projects. BuzzFeed simply made the choice for him…
Still, there is one thing that Mezrahi shares in common with the rest of them: He’s trying to figure out how to make more money off the internet. Aside from the HGTV executive producer credit, most of Zillow Gone Wild’s revenue comes from ads. He did one for “The Bachelor,” posting what looked like a typical listing but for the show’s famed house. PopTarts and Royal Caribbean have also paid him to promote fake listings for a house made of PopTarts, and for the new Icon of the Seas cruise ship.
But the account still brings in “very little” money, he says. He imagines a future where his newsletter has a paid classified section or where he dedicates more time to growing a YouTube audience because that platform can be the most lucrative.
It will be interesting to see how this goes in the next few years. How big can the social media audience get for this account? Would users be willing to pay for such content or special content? How much content could there be? Will a TV show lead to more opportunities or spin-offs or streaming shows? Can Zillow Gone Wild be its own brand soon with different content and products?
They owe younger adults nothing. Older adults worked hard to acquire and maintain their properties. They are holding on to them as valuable assets that can continue to appreciate in value. If they can stay in the homes (considering finances and health), why shouldn’t they stay in the homes they selected as long as they can?
They owe younger adults something. Older adults can balance what they would like as they age – staying in their homes, cashing out the value of those properties – with also helping younger adults who desire housing. This might look different for a variety of households and locations.
They owe younger adults everything. Older adults should actively work to pass along their homes and properties (and their associated wealth and opportunities) to younger people. They should make way for future generations who could benefit from the housing they benefited them. They are passing along a housing legacy that can enrich their children and grandchildren. They have an obligation to insure housing is readily available for those who come after them.
This is a rough approximation of options available within the United States. Numerous articles in recent years highlight this dynamic of generational shifts in housing options and preferences. The housing situation in the United States is unique – emphasizing single-family homes, limited supply, high mortgage interest rates, a big Baby Boomer generation, decades-long housing value increases, and more – and Americans tend to think that housing is a market, not a human right.
Fast forward ten or twenty years down the road: I would guess Americans will follow some middle option above. Some older adults will want to or have to pass along housing, others will hold onto it as long as possible. What might be most interesting is if some of those big houses stop rising in value so much or even lose value – how much might this change the dynamics in housing turnover?
The Sims felt like a trial run for adulthood, exploring how you’d make use of your future autonomy. Much of this validated the importance of personal space: how to lay out a room, how to choose a sofa that balanced aesthetics and comfort, how to make a house a home…
The official trailer for The Sims 4: For Rent emphasizes the potential of “multiunit life,” promising “ample opportunity … [for] eavesdropping, snooping, or even breaking and entering”—a description that instantly evoked memories of my worst roommates…
Inevitably, a lot has changed. The peaceful suburb I remembered from childhood has been replaced by elaborate “worlds” that I can (effortfully, via a loading screen) switch between to grow my property portfolios. TheSims 4 is more immersive and finely drawn, visually, than the original was, but it’s also more involved: It took me a whole afternoon to create my first Sim and set her up in her “hovel.”…
But soon my frustration (as Edith) with Jazz’s requests started to outweigh my commitment to being the Only Good Landlord. Every notification from the rental instantly provoked my impatience. Not the damn tenant again! The slow, clunky transition within the game between Edith’s home and the rental only added to my frustration and my creeping sense of Jazz as a burden. Why did this guy need so much of Edith’s energy?…
With For Rent, The Sims has perhaps moved too far toward reflecting brutal reality, forcing players to choose between being on one side or the other of an often fractious and all-too-familiar power imbalance. As a child, I was drawn to The Sims as a role-play for adulthood, a world of expansive promise and possibility; playing For Rent, I was reminded, depressingly, of how the game is rigged.
The Sims is a game, a product intended to provide enjoyment for players. Can one gamify the rental experience in the United States?
Anyone able to offer an analysis of housing, landlords, and properties in general across the Will Wright creations? Simcity offered a particular take as did SimTower – has this changed noticeably over the years? Are there any video games that do a different or better job of portraying property and renting?
Thanks to a plentiful supply of lumber from old growth pine forests in Wisconsin and Michigan, as well as new milling processes such as kiln drying that gave precut wood precise standardized measurements, a new form of structure started appearing. Workers cottages were more affordable than elaborate, but they came with the promise of a better standard of living for working class families.
A century and a half after they started being built in earnest, an effort is afoot to celebrate and preserve the cottages, houses that have continued to offer utility and accessibility for generations…
The lecture was arranged by the nonprofit Chicago Workers Cottage Initiative, a group organized to celebrate and promote the houses, built mostly from the 1880s to the 1910s, that they say “represent the origins of the ‘American Dream’ of homeownership and the investment and pride of Chicago’s new immigrants.”…
“Some of these cottages were really spartan four-room houses,” Bigott said. “They cost like $600 on a $200 lot. It was a simple frame building, with two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen.”…
It was a model that worked, and its backbone was the workers cottage. Elaine Lewinnek, a professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton, argues in her 2014 book “The Working Man’s Reward: Chicago’s Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl” that the idea of house ownership as “the working man’s reward” was one of Chicago’s most impactful exports, setting the scene for suburbs everywhere.
The suburbs have a longstanding reputation that they are full of people of wealth who are able to purchase a home and afford a suburban lifestyle. Imagine neighborhoods of McMansions, rampant consumerism, and newer vehicles.
If this article looks back at what was over 100+ years ago, what housing today will be viewed as housing for the working person in the suburbs in 2100?
American presidents for at least 90 years have supported homeownership. See these thoughts from Herbert Hoover in 1931. So why not tie President’s Day in February to selling and buying homes?
February might seem a bit early to promote buying and selling homes. It is still cold in parts of the country. The school year still has months to go.
However, I have heard that the housing market tends to pick up after the Super Bowl. Warmer weather is on the way. Families might be more willing to move with less time left in the school year.
Americans like sales and shopping. Why leave President’s Day to mattresses and furniture? Why not kick off the home real estate market every year? Pepper the weekend with quotes from Presidents Obama and Bush. Find some quotes from Lincoln, Washington, and other famous presidents that seem to support the modern idea of homeownership. Match patriotism, capitalism, and holidays.
Put these together and you have a McDonald’s in a castle in northern Indiana:
Image from Google Street View
Only in America might someone build a gas station castle (it looks like a castle but in a McMansiony way) that contains a McDonald’s. I wonder if it attracts any more customers just because it is a castle.
(This building has apparently been around a while but I recently saw a story about it that caught my eye because I have seen other castle gas stations in other northern Indiana trips.)
But over the last few years, tiny homes have morphed from a millennial lifestyle trend or life hack into a potential solution to the housing crisis. As an affordability crisis grips the nation and homelessness surges, tiny-home communities have sprouted from Wisconsin to Austin. In California, grappling with one of the worst housing crises in the nation Gov. Gavin Newsom promised last year to deliver 1,200 tiny homes as interim housing in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, and Sacramento.
Unfortunately, it seems that tiny homes are an imperfect solution to high housing costs and rising homelessness. So why, then, do politicians, nonprofits and even do-gooder corporations love tiny homes so much? It has something to do with Americans’ persistent addiction: an obsession with single-family homes.
And here are my thoughts:
Tiny homes also play into American homeownership aspirations, including a desire for privacy, said Brian Miller, a professor of sociology at Wheaton College. “On the other hand, it’s very different from the typical progression over the last few decades where American homes just keep getting bigger and bigger,” Miller said, later adding that, “tiny houses are sometimes an explicit rejection of that.”
But they’re not necessarily for lower-income families—really they’re for people who can afford this type of lifestyle, one that allows you to do so temporarily while maybe even paying for a storage unit for your material possessions, Miller suggested. And yet, somehow tiny homes have entered into a new era—now posed as an (imperfect) solution to the housing crisis, which has manifested itself in unaffordable housing costs and a growing homeless population. Tiny homes are an individualized solution, Wagner stressed. “The reality is, we just need to build housing,” she said. But the push for tiny homes as an answer to the housing crisis is a perverse outgrowth of the inequality baked into the American economy.
Legally Sociable 