As I feel we all should do, but I have started in earnest, to question all of the assumptions that I was given growing up, and what I think I need to accomplish as an American adult. Full disclosure, I am a college educated white male who has unquestionably benefited from white privilege in America. For today’s episode, I would like to look into the idea that I need to buy a home in the suburbs.
That to me seems to the highest expression of married white male success. I large house in the subdivision of the suburb of a major city where crime is low, schools are good, and everything seems scrubbed clean. We can talk about the banality of the suburbs, but I feel that John Cheever is the mast of it, and it is best left to him. What I see is the con game of the huge house.
The larger the house, the more stuff you have to out in it. Which to keep the economy going, as the top 10% of earners are the only one’s benefiting from this economic growth, then they have to make up for the purchasing that the bottom 90% can’t afford. Bigger houses, more cars, more rooms, more entertainment.
And isn’t this basic Adam Smith Economics 101; that you can either make an inexpensive product that you sell to the masses, or you make an expensive product and sell it to a few people. I feel like we are in the expensive few economies.
Which gets me backs to the idea of buying a home. I feel like new homes are too big and take up too much space. There is nothing small with space. I have to buy big. Then the other side of it is why am I buying a house? It won’t get passed down to my kid. I have seen what my parents, and now some of my friends are doing with homes the inherit; they sell them. No one is passing homes down to their kids. It’s just an investment. Doesn’t it make more sense for me to $2500 a month into an index fund for the next 30 years? Isn’t that a bigger retune on that investment?
But I have been told, and am still continued to be told that I have to get a house. Who does that benefit?
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