This colour coded map of America above that appears in the latest UK Economist magazine is so intriguing. The trend of home-ownership Vs home renting it tracks is truly mind-boggling. Such a sea-change in the complexion of the housing-industry in America in a matter of just 3 short years ?!!
What happened? What are the causes ?
Surely, it can’t be only that interest-rates and inflation-rate went up during these years … can it?
It’s also paradoxical that given America’s very low unemployment rate — people do have plenty of jobs going around, after all, and they do also earn pretty steady incomes — families still do not wish to pursue that one single ambition that has always symbolised the great American Dream of ordinary people : owning a home.
This kind of seismic change in such a short time in attitudes to home-ownership seems to suggest some other deeper, imperceptible churning that perhaps is taking place in both the U.S. economy and in American society at large …
— Is it lack of robust “real-wage increase” growth rate ?
— Is it ever widening, ever deepening “wealth disparity” amongst the social classes ?
— Is it increasing influx of illegal and legal immigrants ?
— Is it just one of those market-driven cyclical movements of the housing sector that happens once every ten odd years ?
— Is the change economic-structural or socio-structural?
Or is the cause something even deeper ? A symptom of some other strange transformation taking place inside the country’s collective psychology and attitudes?
A family’s decision to take on the burden of a 20 or 30 year housing mortgage-loan is almost invariably based on a sense of confidence and optimism about its future — in other words, on a hope that the future can reasonably be expected to be secure, sound, sanguine and stable. That’s, in fact, the psychology verily underpinning the human homing instinct. So, is that sense of confidence now beginning to wobble in the mind of America?
When such subliminal hope for the future, amongst ordinary people, starts to fray, it usually causes a deep and paralysing collective ennui in a nation. The present Administration in the USA — by all well-informed accounts of the American political commentariat, academia and observers — is certainly in the grip of both intellectual and moral paralysis. Such paralysis is evidenced in the many futile wars it has badly got entangled itself with in many parts of the world, and it is also even more starkly evident in the many utterly dysfunctional, self-destructive democratic processes it presides over at home.
Is America thus suffering from a creeping crisis of confidence ? What could it all be due to? The rest of the world can do no more than simply watch and wonder…
Sudarshan Madabushi