Leavin’ Home without It

So many issues fall together in the American obsession with “movin’ on up”…. Step back a year or two and look at the patterns of our lives: We buy “starter” homes with the clear expectation that we will “trade up,” but in the meantime, whether we use a “big box store” or watch the DIY or HGTV networks, we constantly remodel. In that mix, we go to banks, borrow to buy, borrow to build, and engaged construction workers who, more often than not, have to use undocumented workers to make a profit and do the jobs that no American laborer would ever do. Home ownership has been “the American dream” and the “American saving account.” I came, I sawed, I defaulted.

As the economy begins to founder, but Americans cling to consumption patterns that were now decades old, massive discounting superstores, buying in volume, building China into a consumer goods mega-exporter, continue a shift in the balance of payments, where Americans import vastly more than they export – it got to a point before the meltdown where we averaged $60 billion a month in trade imbalance. The stock market loved these deep discounters. Wall Street meets Wal*Mart.

The currency of all of this is the financing of upgrades to the home – trading up or building out. McMansions or out-of-control, cookie-cutter suburban “planned communities.” Granite countertops and stainless steel appliances. Gotta have, gotta buy. Then came the reset button – a managed depression that lost your job or sapped your paycheck, trashed your house, tanked your retirement plan and devalued your upgrades into the ashes of a subprime collapse.

We used to upgrade our television when the old ones work, our computers when we don’t need the extra computing power, our credit cards from green to gold to platinum to graphite, our airline tickets to business class, our cameras to those with more pixels even though the photos rarely are seen beyond an email, our cell phones when all they do is take away the last vestiges of being alone that were left…

Until now… For the majority of Americans, the concern has shifted from “what do I upgrade next” to “how do I keep what I have, or at least as much as I have as I can keep.” The April 25^th NY Times: “[A] report last week by the Census Bureau … found that fewer Americans are changing residences than at any time since 1962, back when there were 120 million fewer Americans than today.” How do I get my life back? How do I resume or at least lose as little as possible?

Think of the permanent contraction of jobs, work that will never come back at anywhere near pre-meltdown levels. Think the big automakers will resume the same level of manufacturing they had in 2006 any time soon? If you specialized in setting up subprime loans or packaging them into derivatives, when do you get your job back? What happens to those contractors who built the vast tracks of unsold “planned communities” in suburbs where no one really wants to live who can really afford a house?

Do Americans who survive this crisis carry the meltdown of 2008 in their psyche the way Depression babies could never shake their memories? Have we really changed our need to upgrade into a mindset of being satisfied with what we have? Ask yourself exactly what you might have expected in your life five years ago compared to what you expect five years from now. How deeply have we changed, and how permanent do you think the change will be? And finally, when this malaise passes, how will those who survive explain what happened to those who will be born beyond the wall of this financial meltdown, well into the future?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.