Who Owns Their Own Home?

Roger Lowenstein's chart on home ownership (link), which kidnap from this morning's NYT, is interesting in itself, and calls to mind some data I saw in the Economist, perhaps back in the 90s.

First, the chart: note how two of the four highest rates of home ownership are in West Virginia and Mississippi--two states by most measures among the poorest. And correspondingly, the lowest: we can forget about DC, the ultimate commuter town. But California, New York, Hawaii. The point, put crudely, is that just because you live in a state richer than Mississippi, it does not follow that you'll be putting down your own roots there.

Now, the remembered data: I recall an Economist chart doing the same sort of analysis for Europe. As I recall, the chart showed a similar pattern: high levels of ownership in
Greece and Ireland (this was before Ireland was rich); mirror-image low numbers in Germany.

I can think of all kinds of inferences you might draw, many mutually cancelling. My friend Taxmom lived and studied in Germany for a while: she remarked on how the Germans just didn't seem to regard home ownership as that big of a deal: it was as as if they felt they lived in a stable society (short memories, not so?) and that they might as well invest their money elsewhere. The Brits seem to have felt this way in a previous generation: as I recall, John Maynard Keynes didn't own his own home. By contrast, one might infer (or then again, one might not) that the Greeks regarded a home as a center of social stability independent of, and more important than, the government itself.



About the same time that I saw the Economist data, I remember hosting a law professor visiting from Athens, a fairly big noise on his home turf. I can remember two offerings from him that may bear on this discussion. One was a question: "Will you tell me, if you don't mind my asking, how many different places you have lived in your time?" Actually the answer is quite a few, but he seemed to find the number downright astonishing--in his country, people put down roots. The other was a remark, muttered sotto voce, as he marvelled at the seeming wealth of our young people: "but our children own their own homes, they own their own homes."