Last week, Fannie Mae (via MarketWatch) reported that Americans were warming up to the idea of homeownership for the first time in years. After a behemoth of a housing crisis, 73 percent of Americans now believe that it’s a good time to buy a home. If the housing market is ready for a turnaround, prices will only go up, and Americans seem ready to embrace a return to normalcy.

There’s just one problem: there’s a good chance it won’t matter. Aside from the fact that polls like this can be very misleading (last April, Gallup came up with very similar numbers), the housing market faces a demographic problem that isn’t likely to go away any time soon.

Since 2006, exurbs and outer-ring suburbs have been losing residents as families move into large cities in greater and greater numbers. This is first time in decades that many suburban counties have seen a loss in population, reports Urbanland. Part of this has been the housing crisis. Exurbs dotted with subprime developments have been hemorrhaging residents for years, but this won’t go on forever. A greater problem, says John K. McIlwain of the Urban Land Institute, comes as boomers retire. Baby boomers created the strongest demand for housing in American history, but their offspring are not likely to do the same. Generation X is far too small to make a similar impact, and Millennials (the echo boom) so far don’t seem all that interested in homeownership, or suburban living. This means that, even if the housing market gets going again, there’s no chance for demand to reach pre-recession levels.

The larger issue is that suburbanization as a social and cultural process is designed for a bygone era. The postwar years were a deeply unequal period of American history, and suburbanization reflected that, especially in terms of race. Redlining—segregating neighborhoods based on race—was federal policy through most of the postwar boom, and segregation remains a serious problem in many areas. But the 1950s and 1960s was also a time when the environmental impact of development was not really a consideration. With more and more people and local governments interested in transit, cycling, and walkability, car-dependent suburbs seem increasingly out of place.  

But what’s really interesting about this trend is that it’s not the result of any actual federal policy. Since the end of World War II, federal dollars planned, created, and maintained suburbia, through public highways, home mortgage insurance, tax deductions for homeowners, and other incentives. As John D. Fairfield points out in 2010’s fascinating The Public and Its Possibilities, in the years following World War II, federal money made suburban homeownership actually cheaper than renting in large cities—at least for the white middle class.

And since then, the fundamentals haven’t changed all that much. The FHA still subsidizes suburban homeownership (albeit more equally), and federal highways and infrastructure still make suburban life possible. Obama has signaled that he’d like to rethink some of these policies, including getting rid of Fannie and Freddie and reducing mortgage subsidies for new buyers, but actual changes are not likely soon. In the meantime, we may see even more people defy government incentives to settle away from urban centers—young people, especially. If these trends continue, cities could look very different over the next generation. Homeownership may remain an American Dream, but suburbs may not.

Sources: MarketWatch, Gallup, Urbanland, the Society Pages, Treehugger, The Atlantic, the Public and Its Possibilities, Huffington.  

Over the past few years, many photographers have tried to frame the home foreclosure epidemic in a meaningful, visceral way. They’ve tried to capture the empty bedrooms and abandoned lots of an over-mortgaged, hollowed out, defaulted-on American Dream.

Ben Grasso, an oil painter based in Cleveland—a city no stranger to foreclosure—has a different method of baring America’s suburban emptiness: blowing up houses. Not literally, of course, but artistically. Ka-boom!

“Grasso takes a modern American painterly tradition and mixes it with contemporary cinematic spectacle,” comments Architizer’s Kelly Chan. “In his subject matter and painting style,”

he overtly borrows the visual vocabulary forged by hallmark painters of modern American life. His thick brushwork and rich, opaque colors find resonance with works by artists like Edward Hopper, Charles Sheeler, Georgia O’Keefe. However, his in-your-face spontaneous combustions recast images of the American dream as volatile fantasies. In these paintings, pristine homes are desecrated, caught in the path of an apocalyptic disaster fit for a summer blockbuster movie.

I’ll add that Grasso’s disassembled homes echo the modern architectural principle of materialistic “honesty,” or being very up front about how the building materials used relate to the structure’s design. (Yes I’m grossly oversimplifying that idea.) Every plank and pipe, every concrete pylon and whitewashed windowpane is exposed in schematic isolation. The homes in Grasso’s painting are frozen between a blueprint and a scrapheap—similar, you might say, to the lives of many middle class Americans today.

Source: Architizer 

Images courtesy of Ben Grasso. 

Many families are shrinking their demands on the American Dream as job prospects dry up. As one woman told Minnesota Women’s Press, a little stability is all she’s seeking. “My new American Dream,” writes Joan Riederer, who has subsisted on temp work for two years while applying for more than 300 positions, “is to have a job with benefits.” Her modest demands come four years into her family’s financial struggles, which started with her husband being laid off after 24 years at an IT consulting company. Mr. Riederer moved to New York, hoping a new job there would support his wife and daughter in Minnesota until he could return. They’re still waiting. In the meantime, the family meets twice a year, “maybe less now that airfares are rising,” writes Joan. Because they still have one IRA—they cashed in the others to cover expenses—the family does not qualify for subsidized healthcare. “I have spent thousands of dollars over the past year alone for medical and dental care,” writes Joan.

 “I feel my years slipping away and I have so much I still want to do,” she writes. “I fear there are many more people with this same story—the one the president doesn’t tell in his employment figures.”

Joan is right that many Americans are struggling to find permanent work. And for those with less financial security than the Riederers, times are, unsurprisingly, even tougher. Today’s Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune reports a 27 percent increase from 2007 in homeless families seeking help from Hennepin County, where Minneapolis is located. “People who work with the homeless say the increase is driven by people losing their jobs, foreclosures on apartment buildings that displace renters, and the effects of welfare reform that has recipients reaching the end of their 60-month lifetime limit on cash assistance,” writes the Star Tribune. In these circumstances, the poor may be pitted against struggling members of the middle class, according to the Star Tribune, people much like the Riederers: “When foreclosed apartments put poor people on the street and they begin looking for a new apartment, they may find themselves competing with people who once owned homes.”

For more on this topic, see “Reimagining the American Dream” in the May/June Utne Reader.

As if abject data roundups like the Harper’s Index weren’t dour enough, there are even more depressing numbers being crunched. Gathering figures from the UK Independent, Bloomberg, and other sources, Eyeteeth compiles various statistics to show the country’s hellbound, handbasket-borne trajectory. 

For example: The Misery Index—by far the most poetically named of the numbers on offer—is calculated by adding unemployment to inflation. It’s at 10.5, its highest in 15 years. There’s a 30-year gap in the average life expectancy between residents of Connecticut and Mississippi (people in the former state live longer). And a new Time/Rockefeller poll shows that 52 percent of Americans believe the “American Dream” is no longer attainable.

The figures are worth a glance, but it’s also illuminating to click through and read the articles from which they’re derived, which examine some of the reasons behind our crumbling quality of life, place them in historical context, and offer suggestions for how we might reverse these negative trends.

Image by ang (3 Girls & a Boy), licensed by Creative Commons.