What Do We Buy Into When We Buy a Home?

In fiction, 2024 was the year of ditching the domestic. (And, if you happened upon a memoir, there was a good chance it was about someone getting divorced.) Look at the feverish reception of Miranda July’s road-trip novel “All Fours.” The main character, a married artist in her mid-forties, sets out from her Los Angeles home, stumbles into a psychosexual dynamic with a young rental-car attendee, and decides to remodel a motel room into a love nest. Rental cars, booking a room—it’s a veritable homage to the erotics of transience. You can imagine the narrator of Ayşegül Savaş’s “The Anthropologists” reading “All Fours” for a book club and having an existential crisis. Savaş’s novel is about a documentary filmmaker who, out of a sense of social obligation, decides that she and her husband should buy a place: “We’d been living in the city for several years by then, and from time to time worried that we weren’t living by the correct set of rules, that we should be making our lives sturdy.” We register her ambivalence toward homeownership when she and her husband respond with barely disguised jealousy after learning that their best friend might be leaving the city to take a new job and pursue an exciting love affair. He’s a renter—he can be that torridly free.

I could relate. I wasn’t sure that I was ready to stop living out what the scholar Pamela Robertson Wojcik calls “the apartment plot.” In her book of the same title, which looks at mid-century representations of “urban living” in film and pop culture, Wojcik cites Doris Day in “Pillow Talk,” Lauren Bacall in “Designing Woman,” Natalie Wood in “Sex and the Single Girl,” and Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” as emblematic denizens of the genre. These films offered “a vision of home—centered on values of community, visibility, contact, density, friendship, mobility, impermanence, and porousness.” I would add “glamour.” Without the imperative to invest in home furnishings, Holly Golightly can blow her powder-room money on Givenchy.

These characters’ real-life inspirations, a postwar generation of career women living alone in New York City, occupied an anxious space in American culture: they were often portrayed as sexy but sad. The missives directed their way now sound aspirational. In 1952, an article in Mademoiselle stated, “The average career girl with an apartment of her own is notorious for the abandoned way she runs her domestic life. Home is not really home—it is a base of operations.” Though onscreen the plot necessitated that these women wind up married (and presumably with a mortgage), the fantasy of the single girl in her apartment has proved unmovable. Carrie Bradshaw goes on to live in a penthouse, but it is her single-girl one-bedroom walkup that still attracts throngs of tourists who pose for pictures on her fictional stoop. (Not for long—the real-life owner of the building just received permission from the city to build a gate in front of it.) Even the apartment plot has gone co-op.

Both options, renting and buying in New York City, felt unsustainable to me. Why couldn’t there be some secret third thing? It turned out that, for decades, there had been. The Mitchell-Lama program, a nineteen-fifties urban-housing initiative, allowed New Yorkers to purchase “limited equity” co-ops, low-cost apartments that they technically owned but couldn’t resell or pass down. If you moved or “went to a better place,” your apartment would go to the next person on the waiting list. You were merely a steward. Mitchell-Lama got some surprise P.R. recently thanks to the actor Timothée Chalamet, who, during his press tour for “A Complete Unknown,” talked about growing up in Manhattan Plaza, a Mitchell-Lama in Hell’s Kitchen that was intended for artists. (Larry David and Alicia Keys also lived there.) The city stopped building new Mitchell-Lamas in the late seventies, but you can still apply for a spot in existing ones. Last year, Clayton Apartments, in Harlem, listed available studios for sale for just over twelve thousand dollars. You can see why, when New Yorkers say they won the lottery, they mean the housing lottery.

A new book, “Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons,” by the urban historian Jonathan Tarleton, recounts the history of the Mitchell-Lama program and examines the threats to its survival. Those threats, he found, came from the very middle-income New Yorkers for whom these homes were built. Tarleton focusses on two buildings whose residents were given the opportunity to “go private”—that is, to leave the Mitchell-Lama system and sell their homes at market rate, pulling the affordable-housing ladder up along with them.

In 2014, Tarleton was the editor-in-chief of Urban Omnibus, the online publication of the Architectural League of New York. One day that fall, he received an e-mail from a man who lived in a Mitchell-Lama in lower Manhattan called Southbridge Towers. The residents there were about to vote on whether to “privatize,” and the tide was turning toward a yes. The pro-privatization camp was so confident that it threw a party at T. J. Byrnes, an Irish pub on the ground floor of the complex. On the invitation, Tarleton notes, was “a smiling, sunglasses-wearing sun” and the words “Living the Dream.” Tarleton’s book follows the lead-up to the vote at Southbridge and to a similar vote at St. James, another Mitchell-Lama, in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill neighborhood. What ensues is a distinctly New York City opera: a bunch of loudmouths obsessed with whose apartment is worth what. A St. James resident who supported affordable housing told Tarleton that a pro-privatization co-op board member approached her and asked, “Did you call me a bitch?” The resident continued, “And I did. I’m not going to turn around and say, ‘I didn’t say it.’ That’s not who I am.” At Southbridge, a resident against privatization identified as James Szal was given a security escort home after the vote. His opponents weren’t all unsympathetic to his cause, but they couldn’t ignore the potential upside. As one put it, “Listen . . . if there’s a million dollars on the ground and I have to stoop down to pick it up, I’ll do that.”

The decision to privatize wasn’t as clear-cut as it might seem to a casual observer with a calculator. For one thing, the residents of Southbridge and St. James would now have the pleasure of seeing how far their money didn’t go on the New York City housing market. Yet Tarleton found that the residents were under the spell of something other than money. To them, ownership came with a vision of boundless possibility: they would get to renovate their counters without asking permission from the board (a moment of dramatic irony for anyone familiar with condo bylaws), other parents would respect them more at school drop-off, and they would get to say “we bought” without an asterisk. An eighty-two-year-old African American resident of St. James whom Tarleton refers to as Lester Goodyear wrote, in one of many manifestos he drafted, “Home ownership is also the first step in acquiring status as a First Class Citizen in America (Owning a piece of the Rock).” Where had he heard this, other than in a Prudential insurance commercial?

Tarleton sees in arguments like Goodyear’s the effects of what he calls “over a century of public policy and real estate propaganda.” American mythology about land ownership long existed as a rationale for Native dispossession, but the house in the little house on the prairie took center stage in 1917, the year of the Bolshevik Revolution. It was then that the U.S. Department of Labor took over a program called Own Your Own Home, which had been run by the National Association of Real Estate Boards. If “housing and cooperative arrangements evoked the supposed contagion of socialism and communism,” Tarleton writes, “the single-family home was the antidote.” The U.S. government distributed two million posters touting the virtues of homeownership to offices, factories, and churches. One stated, “A Man Who Owns His Own Home is a better worker, husband, father, citizen and a real American.” At the bottom, it read, “Talk to your wife about it.” Ideally, she had seen the poster that read, “How glad I am that I agreed with John when he proposed that.”

Herbert Hoover, aside from his stint in the White House, lived in a hotel for most of his political career, yet he was the architect of the idea that America was a nation of homeowners. In 1931, as President, he addressed the Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership, proclaiming that homeownership was “a sentiment deep within the heart of our race and of American life.” Look no further than the American songbook, he told the crowd. “Those immortal ballads, ‘Home, Sweet Home,’ ‘My Old Kentucky Home,’ and the ‘Little Gray Home in the West,’ were not written about tenements or apartments,” he said, adding, “They never sing songs about a pile of rent receipts.”

In 1934, a two-story Colonial surrounded by a white picket fence and dogwood trees appeared just south of Grand Central Terminal, in Manhattan. That year, two hundred thousand visitors toured “America’s Little House,” as the model home was called. Construction was paid for by a federal program called Better Homes in America, and the only occupant was a CBS-affiliate radio station, which promoted homeownership over the airwaves. One of the first radio guests was the country’s new First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, whose husband would institute Federal Housing Administration loans, establish Fannie Mae, and pass the G.I. Bill after the Second World War, all of which made buying a home more financially feasible. In 1959, Vice-President Richard Nixon travelled to Moscow, where he and the Soviet Union premier, Nikita Khrushchev, conducted what became known as the “kitchen debate,” an impromptu televised back-and-forth about the merits of capitalism versus communism, while they toured an American model home outfitted with gadgets from General Electric. “Any steelworker could buy this house,” the Vice-President bragged. I learned about this exchange in a Soviet history class in college, a year before I graduated, in 2008, amid the subprime mortgage crisis.

There were problems with Nixon’s argument even at the time, though. Black Americans, from steelworkers to white-collar professionals, were routinely denied F.H.A. loans and often suffered under redlining policies that made homeownership prohibitively expensive for them. Tarleton believes that Black Americans’ experiences with the real-estate industry explain why the privatization vote unfolded differently at St. James and at Southbridge, with race functioning as a kind of political education. At the predominately Black St. James, residents had less faith in the market. “They would still be Black in a real estate system that had racism baked into its core,” Tarleton writes. He cites the work of my colleague Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who observes, in her book “Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership,” that banks, after decades of refusing to lend or lending on discriminatory terms to Black families, pivoted from exclusion to something she calls “predatory inclusion,” targeting that same demographic with subprime mortgages.

The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 encouraged banks to make loans available to Black Americans and established HUD, which began holding information sessions similar to the one I attended last year. In other words, “more invested in your community” has historically served as a euphemism for “less likely to riot.” “For some,” Taylor writes, “the promotion of homeownership and access to credit in neighborhoods and communities that previously had been ignored was appealing as a new means of social control.” This had been true from the start, for white consumers as well. Adrienne Brown, in her book “The Residential Is Racial,” argues that campaigns like Own Your Own Home wanted white buyers to see themselves as belonging not to a multiracial working class but to a white home-owning class, who, with mortgages breathing down their necks, would be less likely to agitate for better employment terms. “Realtors framed homeownership as a fix-all for radicalism of all stripes,” Brown asserts.