OK, I was being a smart ass and I'm sorry, I should have taken the high ground and said none of the people I know who live in those places feel that way or act that way.
But a rent controlled apartment in NYC or San Fran is just as much a fetishized commodity as home ownership.
Are we just telling anecdotes or are there sociological papers to support the assertion that suburbians do in fact suffer from the narcisism and "coffin building" you described? I found it pretty insulting to me and all the working class people I live near. All of the Puerto Rican immigrants I talk to say a townhouse or small single family home is something they really want, they want to get away from the transient nature of apartments, the paranoia (no one in my neighborhood consistently locks their doors let alone has bars on their windows or locked doors with men guarding them just to get into the building....), the lack of feeling of being part of a real community.
The apartments I lived in sucked. The one upside is I didn't have to rake leaves, OK, but again when I do that I spend half the time getting a bit of exercise outside away from the gym the other half talking with my neighbors - it isn't so bad. I don't half to answer to some asshole who thinks he owns *ME* because he owns the place where I live. If I do something to fix up my house its for me not for my landlord. Many of my apartment living friends do all the same stuff for their apartments that homeowners do and they don't get any money back when they move out, the landlord says "thanks!" and charges the next tenant more.
Fuck landlords.
But my utilities are the SAME for electricity and oil in my 1200 sq.ft. rancher as they were for my 600 sq.ft. apartment, with its awful insulation and shitty windows. I have a few other things I didn't have to pay then - water, swer, trash - and my mortgage payments are a couple of hundred bucks higher.
If someone wants to shoot a rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan or San Fran my way I'm game, I would like 600 or 700 sq ft and it needs to be about $800.
My first post actually answered the question of why the hell people want to live in the suburbs. People obviously want to live in mine because houses stay on the market about a week [some went longer when speculators bought some and tried to 'flip' them]. Take my anecdotes for what they are worth, but if the knee jerk answer to that question is that there is no reasonable way a person would want to live there and as such they suffer from a mental illness, well, I don't think that approach is likely to mobilize people who live there to work for human survival and revolutionary consciousness.
Matt
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