Community development expert Griffith explains that the obsession with home ownership as the key to rebuilding communities is short-sighted. The emphasis on creating more consumer opportunities for individuals may actually undermine efforts to build healthy neighborhoods.
Mark Winston Griffith is a fellow at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy .
"Ownership Society." Thanks to President Bush, those two words roll off the tongue as if they were one. Yet there are times when notions of ownership conspire against notions of society—especially as they play out in the everyday lives of people living in the communities of America. What America really needs is a policy vision which sparks community building and cooperation among its citizens rather than instructing them to simply spend their way into the American Dream.
The Ownership Society is meant to be the 21st century response to The New Deal and the Great Society—programs where the government had a clear role in improving the lives of Americans. These programs had shortcomings, for sure, but they invoked collective work and responsibility. They called on Americans to consider the welfare of the community—to view their personal fate as linked inextricably to their neighbor's fate.
When President Bush talks about the Ownership Society, however, he offers programs that emphasize individual consumer opportunity. Homeownership is a perfect example. As a central pillar in the Ownership Society, homeownership is commonly depicted as a higher form of citizenship to which all Americans should aspire.
A sizeable amount of research on homeownership backs up this valorization. The obsession begins with the theory that single-family homeownership represents a substantial financial investment in a community. This means, the theory goes, that homeowners are less likely to move, more likely to encourage maintenance of property and more likely to care about how their neighborhood environment is affected than their rent-paying peers.
Yet, in my years of running an economic development organization—as well as being a homeowner myself—I have seen how homeownership can also compel people to focus inward at the very expense of the community around them.
In my 12 years as the head of a grassroots organization in Central Brooklyn, most of the homeowner-led groups I came in contact with were of the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) variety. They were more passionate and effective in organizing Brownstone house tours and stopping proposed community projects dead in their tracks than initiating projects with broad social benefits.
At my block association meetings, I am routinely swept up in well-meaning discussions with my fellow homeowners which are inevitably aimed at protecting our own individual property values and interests. When I think of myself narrowly as a homeowner, my backyard becomes my universe. Everything from dog poop on my lawn to subsidized housing on the corner becomes a threat. I get in touch with self-defensive, reactionary and parochial impulses I never knew I had.
Let's be clear: Increasing the capacity of low-income people to own a home is undoubtedly one of the most important asset- and wealth-building strategies currently used by community development professionals across the country. In an economy where many people feel beaten down, homeownership often offers families a refuge, a slice of dignity and a way to exert control over their own lives and environment.
Yet it is misguided to fetishize homeownership, assign it mystical virtues or measure an individual's value to society based on what he or she owns. If the goal of President Bush's Ownership Society is to create stakeholders who are responsible, contributing members of society, we need national leadership that can discern consumerism from citizenship.
Homeownership is a high-stake affair. By proposing individual-based approaches like school vouchers and privatized social security accounts, American domestic policy increasingly isolates the family struggles and economic fortunes that were once a more shared experience among Americans. At the same time, our culture encourages working and middle-class people to centralize their financial security in a single-family home. Under these conditions, civic engagement that is not directly tied to one's property interest is a luxury few homeowners can afford.
Programs like the American Dream Downpayment Initiative (ADD), which was passed unanimously by Congress in 2003 with overwhelming bipartisan support, provide down payment assistance to low-income families. While ADD is a worthwhile initiative, it and other federal homeownership programs focus almost solely on greasing the wheels of the housing market. Instead of accepting an exclusively market-based paradigm, progressives need to call the Ownership Society for what it really is. Then it can be used as an opening for community development advocates and professionals to also promote models like land trusts and limited equity cooperatives, alternative forms of property ownership which enable residents to share and spread both the high risks and benefits of homeownership.
Likewise, when we talk about lowering barriers to homeownership, lawmakers should protect and update the Community Reinvestment Act and introduce economic justice legislation that addresses discriminatory, structural impediments in the housing and lending markets, like high-cost, predatory mortgages.
When the conversation turns to the ownership society, community, political and religious leaders should talk about the responsibility that homeowners have to their neighbors and how they can use their social capital and local standing to rebuild the communities around them. Maybe then, homeownership can be used to inspire a higher moral purpose than "Get Yours."
