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What Houses Say
by Ken Mayer
The way we live has always reflected what we value. Often what’s really important to us comes through as we present ourselves and our homes to the world.
I’ve been looking at residential architecture lately as my wife and I searched for housing and trying to “read” what each house had to say. What the houses told me was a little disturbing. In many parts of the city, the facades shout about love of the automobile. Strips of concrete nearly as wide as a two-lane highway take up much of the green space seen by the approaching visitor. The house itself often reinforces how valuable the cars must be to the inhabitants, because a third to half or more of the facade is devoted to vehicle storage.
While the emphasis on cars may be a bit odd, I found other features downright troubling. I noticed a general sense of isolation projected in the way many houses are built. First, the front door is often recessed into the façade, apparently subordinating where people enter to where the cars go in. Further, the porch is often tiny, cramped for even two or three people. It seems to say “go away, we don’t want any visitors.” The message is reinforced once a week when the occupant’s garbage is put on display at the curb. They spend their time on the back of the house, thus avoiding having to relate in any way to the street and the majority of their neighbors.
Because I teach a course in applied demography, I got to wondering just how big a deal this house business is to most people, and I thought it might be a timely topic for my students. What I found surprised me. In the year 2000, the Bureau of the Census reported that the roughly 105 million households in this country had a median net worth, that is, assets less liabilities, of $55,000. But, the median net worth less home equity was only $13,473. That means that a bit more than three quarters of the wealth held by a typical household in this country is in their home. Our mothers sometimes warned us never to be “house poor,” but they also warned “not to put all our eggs in one basket.” Apparently most of us only heard the former.
It strikes me that there is great potential for trouble in those numbers. We’ve seen some of that in the consternation over falling prices and foreclosures, but I wonder if our huge undiversified home investments might represent another kind of diversity issue. If most of your nest egg is in your house, then anything that even has a whiff of lowering your property value has got to be frightening whether it’s a cell phone tower, a half-way house or a neighbor with a different skin color.
Maybe this downturn in housing isn’t all bad if it helps us rethink what we really value and how we tell the world what’s important through our homes.
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