Wither the Suburban Homeowner?

The American Interest has a special issue devoted to Plutocracy and Democracy. On Thursday, the Hudson Institute hosted a discussion featuring various speakers, including Tyler Cowen. I watched some of it from home.

Apart from Tyler, the speakers in the first hour were dreadful. When a poli sci professor starts telling me that the root cause of the Trump phenomenon is people resenting the Citizens United Supreme Court case, I think that it is more likely that the root cause of the Trump phenomenon is people resenting narrow intellectuals like this poli sci professor.

As for the magazine, on line I read the article by Walter Russell Mead, which I strongly recommend. (Be careful–you are only allowed to read one article unless you subscribe. Keep an extra web browser handy.) He draws an interesting parallel.

The contemporary crisis of the middle strata in American society is perhaps best compared to the long and painful decline of the family farm. The American dream we know in our time—a good job and a nice house in a decent suburb with good schools—is not the classic version. The dream that animated the mass of colonists, that drove the Revolution and that drew millions of immigrants to the United States during the first century of independence, was the dream of owning one’s own farm. Up until the 20th century, most Americans lived in rural communities.

What Mead goes on to sat is that the family-farmer dream came to be replaced by the suburban (and small town) homeowner dream. However, he raises the prospect that this latter dream may be in the process of fading out. I wish he had developed this idea further. Let me try:

In the three decades following World War II, the lifestyle that people aspired to, and often could achieve, involved ownership of a house with a yard and reliance for transportation on a family car. Nowadays, many young professionals do not aspire to that lifestyle, preferring to live in urban condos and apartments and to dispense with personal automobiles. Meanwhile, the postwar lifestyle has become harder to achieve for many people.

Mead refers to the threatened class of homeowners and homeowner-aspirants as Crabgrass Jacksonians.

Crabgrass Jacksonians do not trust the professional class anymore: not the journalists, not the professors, not the bureaucrats, not the career politicians. They believe that if these folks get more resources and power they will simply abuse them. Give the educators more money and the professors will go off on more weird and arcane theoretical tangents and the teachers’ unions will kick back and relax. In neither case will they spend more time helping your kids get ready for real life. Give the bureaucrats more power and they will impose more counterproductive regulations that throttle small business. Give the lawyers more power and they will raise prices and clog commerce with lawsuits and red tape. Give the politicians more time in office and more tax money to spend and they will continue stroking the fat cats while calling rhetorically for change.

Again, I recommend the entire essay.

17 thoughts on “Wither the Suburban Homeowner?

  1. Nowadays, many young professionals do not aspire to that lifestyle, preferring to live in urban condos and apartments and to dispense with personal automobiles.

    But really only unmarried or childless young professional couples. Before kid #1 enters school, they still generally want to be in the suburbs. Around here, a lot of new grads head to Chicago, but approximately none of them stay there once they start families.

    • One thing I like about Walter Russell Mead is his periodic discussion of the notion of “blue rot” or the “crisis of the blue model.”

      The “Crisis of the blue model” fits in with Slocum’s observation above of people living in Chicago till they have kids, and then moving to the suburbs. The blue model (especially?) is characterized by center cities with poorly performing school districts, largely full of non-Asian minority students, and in some cases full of unruly minority kids who, by high school, are 4 school years behind their white contemporaries (so that Black 12th graders on average have the reading proficience of white 7th or 8th graders).

      It’s a relatively new phenomenon that emerged over the last 50 or 60 years–but you see it in many American cities. I’m wondering, in fact, where is it that you don’t see it?

      = – = – = – =

      More generally, I won’t commit to the notion of the liberal professional households not owning a car. This is a life style in a handful of cities only: proably Manhattan, Brooklyn, San Francisco, extreme inner Chicago (the Gold Coast rather than say Edgewater which is still in the Chicago city limits. You can live in Edgewater, Chicago without a car. That doesn’t mean that the people don’t own cars there–they just don’t drive them to the Loop for their work commute. Must go look at data, obviously.

      Even if the car is not necessary for the daily commute to work, it is necessary for either weekly shopping trips or excursions out of the central city. Probably Uber and “car rental by the hour” will keep chipping away at the percentage of households that own cars.

      In many places the car is necessary simply to hold a job–or to be able to get to work on time for one’s next job.

      = – = – = – =

      This post is rich with possiblities–the notion of the suburban family going the way of the family farm boggles the mind.

      • The failure of the blue social model is that smart liberals have a TFR of 0.63. They don’t experience lots of catastrophic life failures because they don’t really live. They move to the city, engage in rat race lifestyle, then die alone.

  2. I am down to basically family members, (certain) economists, comedians, and contrarian investors as the only people I listen to.

  3. “In no case (with the possible and partial exception of the military) do crabgrass Jacksonians believe that the professional upper-middle class is sincerely determined to bend its efforts and its power to the single and sole goal of maintaining the well-being of the people who pay their salaries and fees. In that sense they see the emergence of the real plutocrats and financial powers as simply an extreme case of the disregard for the public welfare that marks the professional class as a whole. Investment bankers are simply better at doing what the whole upper-middle class is trying to do: loot and pillage the population at large by wielding its cleverness and its connections as a weapon.”

    In this, the middle class is quite right. Do people like Bryan Caplan not go out of their way to say the American middle class deserves to be poorer, because according to his theories it might make someone in the third world richer? Does Tyler Cowen not have a whole book talking about how he wants the children of the American middle class to live in Brazilian style shanty towns? Let’s not even get into Scott Sumner’s deranged rantings.

    The overwhelming and DEEP hatred of the professional classes for the majority of their own populations are quite remarkable, in the wake of things like Trump and Brexit they don’t even try to hide it anymore.

    What’s happened among the UMC is that a genuine human connection and empathy for the American middle class has been replaced by abstractions of ideology. People aren’t interested in the welfare of humans, but of ideas. Even when those ideas are theoretically in the service of someone somewhere, it all feels a little hollow and often hypocritical. It’s no surprise that as data comes in showing the failure of these ideas, nobody advocating them seems to care or want to change course.

    Nobody really cares if the ideas work, only that they are carried out. Ideas and abstractions are often poor ways to achieve ends. The human brain is practically designed to bullshit, and abstractions are way easier to bullshit around then actual human beings. The story of the pharisees is quite apt, they follow the law but they don’t care if the law works. It’s no surprise that they were constantly finding loopholes in the law that happened to benefit them, nobody ever follows a law they don’t believe in any meaningful way.

    “Technological change rather than professional malfeasance is in truth driving the breakup of the Crabgrass Utopia of populist Jacksonian memory. The forces breaking up the old American social system are as irresistible as the forces that destroyed the family farm. The failure of American intellectuals and upper-middle-class professionals is not that we failed to preserve the old industrial system; the failure is that, so far, we have not yet come up with a viable and attractive alternative.”

    This is bullshit of course, and the last paragraph shows what self aggrandizing bullshit it is. Technological change didn’t import 40+ million Hispanics in three decades (and the equivalent Muslims in Europe). It didn’t force us to run a huge trade deficit with a country manipulating its currency thus creating huge financial bubbles. It didn’t make us invade Iraq. It didn’t force this SJW cultural nonsense down peoples throats. I could go on and on listing things, but the fact that robots can weld a car door didn’t create the America of 2016. These things are *unforced errors*.

    • The US is a large open society with huge borders that sits in a hemisphere that is majority hispanic. Is it really an unforced error that we have a large flow of hispanic immigrants?

      Do we really have more “huge financial bubbles” than we did 30 years ago?

      Do we have trade deficits because of Chinese currency manipulation, where they “take advantage of us” by selling us stuff for less than it is really worth, or because we are so successful, we are the world’s reserve currency?

      These things aren’t unforced errors. They aren’t even errors.

      • Tom, while I disagree with much of the post you responded to, many of the 40 million hispanics are or were illegally or are children of illegals. Is it to much to ask that the law be enforced? This has had a lot to do with increased income inequality and the fate of the blue collar worker.

        • “Is it to much to ask that the law be enforced?”

          I don’t know your personal point of view, but I think I can safely say that it is too much to ask for a majority of Americans. There is a reason we make no serious attempt to do so.

          Most voters who call for such enforcement don’t necessarily reconcile that preference with the necessary changes required to pull it off. If they had to vote for the militarized borders, the intrusions, the unlimited scope of federal surveillance, the tax increases, etc… they would probably realize it isn’t worth the effort

  4. Whose fault is it? Who put those politicians in power? Who listens to their BS and demands seconds? Who insists on being told what they want to hear? Now they look for Saint Trump to save them from their sins without even considering what is possible, without even seeking sense. Revenge may be sweet but will prove unsatisfying.

    • That’s why we like the market. In the market, you can stay irrational, but eventually it gets corrected, or at least you tend to have to pay for it yourself.

  5. What Mead goes on to sat is that the family-farmer dream came to be replaced by the suburban (and small town) homeowner dream.

    While true the family suburban house did replace the family farm, I am not sure who the author is blaming for the diminished family suburban other than lawyers and teachers unions.

    1) Long term the suburban small house was not small town center. The state with the biggest growth after WW2 was California in which they created city suburbs not small towns. (I remember the reality in Minnesota as well, in which all the population growth was around the Twin Cities.)

    2) It strikes me the smaller town suburbs especially in the Rust Belt are the ones suffering the most the last generation. These towns were organized around a factory and when the factory closed 20 years ago, the town has diminished. These towns struggling has very little to do with teacher unions and more to do with PSST realities. The solution for these people to avoid families in the failing town and move to the city.

    3) If you assume the Post-WW2 American Dream of a good suburban home, doesn’t that explain a lot of the Housing Bubble? Additionally if the reality of the rising cost of this American Dream, doesn’t make sense that young people are changing to a more city life?

    • What are average or lower IQ people going to find in the city? They aren’t going to get well paying professional class jobs.

      We’ve already gone down the path of “everyone go to college and become an urban striver” path. It didn’t increase the professional class, it just created a lot of urban baristas with student loans not starting families.

      If you really wanted to make cities more attractive you should make them cheaper to live in so a middle class person would be able to afford it. The best way to do that is to clear out the NAMs making half of every major city unusable.

      • The only legal way to “clear out the NAMs” is to make it too expensive for them to live there.

      • I live in Dallas and for now at least the dream is alive. And the key has been lower cost of living (including lower cost housing because of less regulation). Scott Sumner had a post how far fewer people were living below the poverty line in Texas than California when adjusted for the cost of living.
        Really when conservatives want to compare Texas and California the blue state model is broken.

  6. The replacement of “family farm” with “family home” as a dream is quite true.

    But for most people, the dream of having a job and being married, with children, in a family home, remains a fairly realistic dream. But getting marred to a person you’ll stay married to seems a bigger uncertainty in the dream than that of having a job.

    The poverty creation result of a society supporting single mothers raising children is not mentioned in the interesting article, but it’s the biggest change.

    That’s culture, not tech so much – altho birth control and the illusion of having full power over pregnancy is negative for this.

    The “good life” dream promoted by a party culture that looks like an extended adolescence of being a rich college student is also pretty negative.

    Good article, and not much changed from 2011.

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