Dreams turned to dust
If there’s one thing the Great Recession has taught us, it’s this: Be careful when you buy what you’re sold.
The Libertarians among us, and those who own the big banks, have had to be dragged kicking and screaming in the direction of some solution that won’t leave large masses of people homeless and/or destitute. It’s the borrowers’ fault, they say; they shouldn’t have borrowed more than they could pay back.
That’s doubtless true in some cases, maybe even in a lot of cases. But the very fact that large numbers of people were able to borrow their way into the poorhouse (or the losthouse) says that there’s something rotten at the heart of the system. Whether it’s a home mortgage or credit card debt or onerous student loans, nobody who’s now crosswise with the financial system ever started out saying, “Gee, I’m going to borrow more money than I can ever hope to pay back and maybe even be left without a place to live! Yippee!”
While people have behaved irresponsibly in many cases, those who have pushed debt as the royal road to the good life have to take some responsibility here as well. We don’t just live in a consumer culture. We live by a consumer ethic. Remember George Bush’s advice after 9/11? “Go shopping.” Yeah, that’ll show them ragheads, eh? Eat my Mercedes, Osama.
In fact, the thing that started the whole mess, the housing bubble, is emblematic of that. We’ve all been told, since were little tykes, that owning a house is the American Dream. The drumbeat is incessant. That’s the big sales pitch. How many times have you heard that?
What they didn’t tell you about owning a house is that for the term of your mortgage, you don’t actually own it. The bank does. When I first bought a house, mowing the lawn always provided a sort of grim amusement. I hate yard work like I hate nothing else and it galled me, on some level, to mow a lawn that really wasn’t even mine. The first few of the 12 years I owned it, I figured that every month I acquired maybe another square inch of the yard. Had to mow the whole thing, though.
Still, that was the deal I made. Our house payments were rather hefty, although not big enough to deduct off our income taxes. I enjoyed living in the place, but I didn’t enjoy paying the plumber when the bathtub drain stopped up, nor did I enjoy sucking water out of the basement in the spring. And I sure as hell didn’t enjoy mowing that lawn.
That’s when it occurred to me that the whole “American Dream” thing was a hustle. I should’ve known to begin with, being from a family with a classic immigrant story. My grandparents were contadini, Italian peasants. Back in the old country, owning land and a house wasn’t even a possibility. That changed when they came here, although they came within a whisker of losing everything during the Depression. When the bank was about to foreclose on the house, my grandfather, a carpenter, went to the banker and struck a deal: If they’d let him keep his house, he’d work on restoring the other homes the bank had foreclosed on. It worked.
But still, it was an accomplishment for my grandparents to actually own something. It was a marker that life here was different than that in the old country.
My parents’ generation retained that hunger for property. It was, to them, security. And it really was in those days. Times were different.
But now, people have learned that owning a house and a plot of land is less security than a form of golden handcuffs. The game is so weighted in favor of the banks that unless the homeowner has a rock-solid guarantee of income – something which also no longer exists – he has to worry about sinking under the waves of debt.
Having owned a house, and even having lived under some less-than-stellar landlords, I can say with near-certainty that I’ll never buy a house again. I never really felt that pride of ownership, because I knew at the end of the day the bank owned the place. I was two payments or so away from being on the street. We never came close, but it was more a matter of luck than any particular skill.
But here’s what I realized: The “American Dream” of owning a house wasn’t all that dreamy. I never sat in my living room and said, “Gee, I’m a landowner. If only Grandpa could see me now.” I don’t think Grandpa would’ve cared. It sure as hell didn’t mean all that much to me to own a few square inches of dying sod on Broadway. Sure, there were advantages to owning a house, but nothing lasting. We sold it just as the housing market was in the early stages of going to hell and got just enough profit to stake us to our new lives, but I’m not sure the profit was worth the 12 years of work.
And we had a relatively good experience. Our American Dream never turned into a nightmare, as it has for so many whose ships entered the iceberg lanes. We got out in time.
Yes, I bought the sales pitch just like everybody else. Before I realized I was mowing the bank’s lawn, I was roped in by the romantic hunger for pointing at a piece of property and saying, “Mine.”
Fortunately, I managed to escape the sales pitch with a few bucks in my pocket. But as the song says, I won’t get fooled again. I’m going to pay attention to my own dreams and not listen to those who are trying to sell me something more insidious: their version of what my dream ought to be.