On Mar 23, 2007, at 10:05 AM, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
> One thing that really defies my understanding of this country is
> why on
> earth even the poorest schmuck insists of individual home ownership
Roediger has an interesting chapter on that issue in his latest whiteness book - owning a house was an important part of the whitening process for the southern and eastern European immigrants in the early 20th century. It often meant a tremendous financial sacrifice, but they didn't care.
The other day, Michael Perelman pointed to a paper by Andrew Oswald <http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/faculty/oswald/ homesnt.pdf> that demonstrated a high correlation between homeownership and unemployment rates for a number of European countries (high homeownership = high unemployment, that is) - and almost none at all beteen unemployment and wage rates or welfare state generosity. He theorized that this was because ownership limited mobility, but Americans think nothing of selling a house and moving 2000 miles, so I'm not convinced by this. But it's interesting that the countries with the highest ownership rates are on the periphery, historically poorer countries like Ireland and Spain, and the lowest are at the core, like Germany. The state with the highest homeownership rate in the U.S. is West Virginia, which is our own internal periphery.
Doug