The Pursuit of Square Footage
(Page 2 of 3)
May - June 2008
by Charles Montgomery, from the Walrus
This conundrum is particularly urgent in Vancouver, Canada’s most expensive real estate market. People seeking big homes have to chase that dream right out to the edge of suburbia. But life in the sprawlscape punishes them in ways that rarely make it into the home-buying calculus.
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Take commuting, for example. You would think that people would put up with a long commute if that pain were balanced out by, say, the pleasure of living in a finer home. A landmark study of German commuters, however, found that the longer their commutes, the less happy people are with life in general. While we become dulled over time to the wonders of our new houses, we never get used to ongoing irritations like tailgaters, or gridlock, or missing dinner with the family.
The contractors lifted our old house off its crumbling foundations last June. They poured concrete, built new walls, and lowered the thing in July. Windows arrived in August. In September, we decided we needed a new roof and vaulted ceilings over the kitchen. We wrote more checks, and I fretted into October. Was this house going to be an expensive machine for unhappiness? Was it even on the right street? This last question, I soon found out, is just as important as the shape of the house, and the answer is tied to how we feel about the Joneses.
Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky has found that low-ranking baboons get stressed out under the constant, threatening frowns of alpha males. Their bodies respond by pumping out hormones that are terrific for powering short sprints away from aggressors but terrible for long-term health. Sapolsky pointed out to me that humans are affected by status just as much as other primates are. For example, a study of thousands of British civil servants found that bureaucrats with lower social ranking died younger than their superiors. In the United States, the poor are sickest in cities where income disparity is widest, suggesting that merely feeling poor can hurt us.
Sapolsky believes his baboons might have something to teach us about how to deal with status anxiety. Average baboons mitigate the stress of subordination by hanging out, picking and eating parasites from one another’s fur—in other words, by spending quality time with friends. It’s the same with humans. We have evolved to be social. Think again of our hunter-gatherer ancestors: When they worked together, they fared much better against enemies and toothy beasts. Our bodies still reward us for playing well with others. When we cooperate or have trusting interactions, our brains pump out oxytocin, a hormone that makes us feel good.
Trust, then, offers a fast track to happiness, but what does it have to do with real estate? Tons, as it turns out. Economists at the University of British Columbia mashed up Canadian survey and census data and found that the happiest neighborhoods in big cities tend to be those where trust is highest.