The Unexpected Political Salience of the Home-Ownership Myth Shows that Political Moderates are Even More Wrong
In January 2025, I took the deliberately provocative position that "Being Unable to Buy a House (as Opposed to Renting) is Generally a Good Thing." This morning, I came across Michelle Goldberg's latest New York Times op-ed, in which she described having attended a campaign event headlined by one of the recent wave of young, extreme right-wing provocateurs, this one running a fringe campaign for governor of Florida:
After [James] Fishback's speech, I met Jeremiah Kimmell, a 22-year-old wearing one of the blue “America First” baseball caps common to [Nick] Fuentes’s movement, and the 20-year-old Charles Metcalf. Kimmell runs a land-clearing business but sees little prospect of an independent adult life. “We live with our parents,” he told me. “We don’t see any end in sight, in that we’re not going to own a home. Something has to change.”
Is it possible that the lurch to the anti-democratic, hateful right was driven in part by decades of terrible social messaging about "the American Dream"? Yes, that is possible, perhaps even likely, as I will discuss below. I will then argue that this issue provides further reason to push for the long-overdue demise of obsessive centrism among US political pundits and in the Democratic Party.
My column last January was in substantial part a response to a British news lad's complaint about young people in the UK not being able to buy their own homes. His YouTube channel -- TLDR, which is actually several related channels covering different countries and regions -- is produced and written by some very young journalists based in central London. In the video to which I was responding, the extremely earnest young host offered a lament that would surely resonate with many Americans as well:
Now, for many of us here in the UK, it seems like it's getting harder to reach the major milestones of adulthood. At the same time in our lives when our parents and grandparents would have been setting up their adult lives, buying their first home and having children, we're still renting property and getting frustrated over the increase in our Netflix subscriptions. ...
Purchasing your own home is probably one of the largest and costliest that you'll make as an adult. However, it's also one of the most financially advantageous. No longer are you throwing money away to a landlord. You're investing in an asset, an asset that, historically speaking, reliably appreciates in value. In essence, the sooner you get onto the property ladder, the sooner you're financially secure.
That second paragraph continues to drive me crazy, even fourteen months later. I am almost pounding my head on the table as I again confront the mindless inanity of the pro-ownership mantra. If this young man would hate to be "throwing money away to a landlord," how much better would it feel to be throwing it away to a mortgage banker? Those are the choices. This is not an advanced financial concept, and it is certainly not a "theory." Apples-to-apples comparisons of owning one's residence versus renting are easy to find, and because so many people have been brainwashed into believing what our young English friend believes, housing markets almost always include a price premium on buying -- even after taking into account tax subsidies, the portion of monthly mortgage payments going into equity, and so on.
In that January 2025 piece, I drew from a column that I wrote in 2012 on the same topic. Indeed, I went on a bit of a tear in the years after the Great Recession, writing dozens of columns explaining why it is objectively bad public policy to try to get people to own rather than rent. Houses do not "reliably appreciate in value," and to the extent that they appreciate on average over time, their gains badly lag those of other assets. Moreover, here is how I summarized one of the key facts about financial security:
No responsible financial advisor would ever advise a one-asset savings strategy, but the entire social and policy conversation around housing in many countries all but begs young people to make decisions that will leave them poorer. And that is to say nothing of the increasing likelihood that a person will need to move unexpectedly, long before any growth in the value of their home outweighs the closing costs.
But suppose I am wrong. I definitely am not, but even if I were, my point today is that telling generations of Americans (and Brits, Canadians, and apparently the citizens of nearly every prosperous country in the world, save a few exceptions like Switzerland) that home ownership is da bomb has had horrible consequences. That is, even -- or especially -- if it truly were a great thing for young people to get on the "wealth ladder" by buying houses, then reaching a point like now where it no longer feels within reach to the youngest generation is going to have consequences.
Political consequences. As Goldberg put it in her Times column, "anyone concerned with the escalating extremism of the young right should be paying attention to [Fishback's] campaign and the enthusiastic crowds it's drawing. More than any political candidate yet, Fishback has managed to bring the paranoid, transgressive, meme-drunk spirit of the right-wing internet into the real world." And if those barely post-adolescent boys attending the rallies are drunk on the idea that the world cheated them by not allowing them to buy houses like all the old people did, that is a problem.
To be sure, it is possible that this toxic political stew would be just as rancid without one of its ingredients. The sexism, racism, anti-trans bigotry, and immigrant-bashing insanity that feeds this crowd might all exist even if everyone could buy a house with a white picket fence (emphasis on white). I am not so sure, however, that it makes sense to think of the housing issue as merely one toxin among equals. Recall that that British YouTuber said this: "Purchasing your own home is probably one of the largest and costliest that you'll make as an adult. However, it's also one of the most financially advantageous." Without that angst as a core ingredient, the rest of the concoction might simply not have become so poisonous and perversely popular.
Goldberg's column also (apparently inadvertently) enhances a point that I have seen recently about "moderate" voters and the vaunted centrism to which the Democratic establishment has been so attached for decades. The political analyst G. Elliott Morris argues that so-called moderate voters are not moderate in the sense of adhering to a pleasingly sanded-down blend of left-ish and right-ish ideological policy views. They are simply not ideological at all. As he put it in a recent interview (video title: "Why the Moderate Voter is a Myth"):
[A]bout a quarter of Americans are solidly liberal. ... Another quarter of Americans are about solidly Republican or solidly conservative, or we just call them right-leaning because they're not super, lower-case "c" conservative in the traditional sense. And the rest of Americans, if you ask them what they care about, what they want their average party to fight for, they don't signal ideological priorities. They're not saying, "I want a party to reduce the national debt, or ... end wars in the Middle East," or what have you. They're saying, "I just want the government to take care of me, to lower the cost of living, to make health care more affordable, provide me a home, ... safety on the streets, low crime," etc. These are people that are sending a signal that they're just ... interested in high quality of government and of living, and they're not necessarily ideologues."
Morris then describes "the strategist's fallacy" of talking to non-ideological voters about ideology and argues that politicians should instead talk about "conditions, not necessarily ideological moderation."
With that in mind, now consider another part of Goldberg's column, in which she quotes from another attendee at the political rally for the super-bigoted candidate in Florida. That young woman told her that "[t]his is the first thing I’ve ever really shown up to since the Black Lives Matter protests." Goldberg then lays this on us:
[She is] a case worker for foster children, ... a registered Democrat and a "big Zohran Mamdani fan." But she said she’s considering changing her registration so she can vote for Fishback in the primary. She's drawn to his promise not to take money from AIPAC and to his insistent emphasis on affordability. [S]he and her fiancé have to live with roommates because rent is so expensive and homeownership unachievable.
She told me that she listens to Fuentes sometimes, and some of what he says makes sense to her. "I would say that there are some things that he speaks for that I agree with, especially about things not being affordable, about the elites purposefully keeping the general population under their control by pricing us out of things that should be considered basic needs[.]" And she listens to Candace Owens, who has lately been accusing Charlie Kirk's wife of complicity in a Zionist plot to murder him. "My politics are kind of confused, right?" she told me with a laugh.
I have pointed out in some recent columns that even non-lazy pundits have accepted the lazy and statistically unsupported claim that Trump (barely) won the 2024 vote because of grocery prices, where the evidence in fact points to a large enough subset of a key voting bloc turning away from the non-White female candidate and voting for the White male candidate. Even so, I also suggested in a related column that there is nothing wrong with Democrats deciding to push affordability issues now.
My additional point here is that any such pivot needs to be made in light of the fact that young people were wrongly fed a load of bull about home ownership. Even though it was nonsense all along, you have to take the voters where they are. And it is even more important to learn the lesson that Democratic centrists never seem to learn, which is that people care about issues and not about political theories. Democrats' positions on almost all issues have been left-of-center for quite a long time, and those positions have always been popular, including on economic matters like minimum wages, taxing the rich, student debt relief, and so on.
If the Mamdani fans out there and others are again told that "you have to accept a dull, moderate version of what you care about," they will be easy pickings for the purveyors of hate who are feeding off of so many people's fear and vulnerability.
- Neil H. Buchanan