In the American mind, renters are regarded as an unsavory lot, willful dissidents from the American dream. They do things like put cars up on cinder blocks in their front yard or, worse, live in your basement. The vision of an Ownership Society was about more than just houses, but the promotion of homeownership was, for a time at least, its most successful element. You know the story by now: The rate of homeownership climbed to almost 70 percent, sellers walked out of closings trundling wheelbarrows full of cash, and the phrase “granite countertops” seemed to hold as much promise as “plastics” did in The Graduate. Then it all fell apart. We woke up in a Rentership Society, and it’s starting to look permanent. And you know what? Thank goodness. Ownership, it turns out, is for suckers.
– The opening paragraph of “Abandon Ownership! Join the Rentership Society!”, Chris Suellentrop‘s short essay on “the new century’s American dream” in this month’s Wired.
Funny, I was just commenting on this topic yesterday on cribchatter… my response below the quoted first paragraph paragraph below; I was responding to the posters comment proposing that someone could instead rent the condo instead of buying, pick up chicks around the corner at the bar Big City on Belmont (big shitty), but tell the chicks that you own the condo instead of renting:
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“Of course you could always rent one of these for even under this cost of owning and still pull tail at the ol big shitty and just tell them you own.”
I always get a kick out of people that seem to derive a sense of self-worth out of owning a place vs. renting. Renting can be a luxury; live in a great place in Chicago for a year or two, pay someone to move you another great place in New York… with increasing remote/working from home scenarios, this is more and more common.
With owning, many depend on that build up of equity that others can afford to give up. Now if you own AND own it outright, that’s a different story, but a lot of people who ‘own’ thier place actually only own 20%, 35%, whatever…
Ultimately, if you need to attach your sense of self-worth out of the place that you live in, then do so equally whether you own or rent.
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Here’s a link to the CribChatter thread for anyone who wants to follow the discussion there.
Cars up on cinder blocks? Living in your basement?
That’s not renters. That’s an ethnic group from my old neighborhood in New Jersey that changing mores prohibit me from naming.
My part of that discussion was really just a sidebar comment that no one else cared to subsequently comment on.
Comments on that website tend to be on the more inconsequential or paltry side, so I presume my message didn’t really get through to many of the readers anyway 😉 nevertheless, I still end up skimming it sometimes…
I just read the whole article that the QOTD was taken from.
Strikes me as a New Yorker making a virtue out of a writer’s fate, and an expression of what a New York Magazine article called the “rage of the creative underclass.”
A similar article on the same subject.
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2013684,00.html