The End of Aspiration

The End of Aspiration

written by Joel Kotkin

Since the end of the Second World War,  middle- and working-class people across the Western world have sought out—and, more often than not, achieved—their aspirations. These usually included a stable income, a home, a family, and the prospect of a comfortable retirement. However, from Sydney to San Francisco, this aspiration is rapidly fading as a result of a changing economy, soaring land costs, and a regulatory regime, all of which combine to make it increasingly difficult for the new generation to achieve a lifestyle like that enjoyed by their parents. This generational gap between aspiration and disappointment could define our demographic, political, and social future.

In the United States, about 90 percent of children born in 1940 grew up to experience higher incomes than their parents, according to researchers at the Equality of Opportunity Project. That figure dropped to only 50 percentof those born in the 1980s. The US Census bureau estimates that, even when working full-time, people in their late twenties and early thirties earn $2000 less in real dollars than the same age cohort in 1980. More than 20 percent of people aged 18 to 34 live in poverty, up from 14 percent in 1980. Three-quarters of American adults today predict their child will not grow up to be better-off than they are, according to Pew.

These sentiments are even more pronounced in France, Britain, Spain, Italy, and Germany. In Japan, a remarkable three-quarters of those polled said they believe things will be worse for the next generation. Even in China, many young people face a troubling future; in 2017, eight million graduates entered the job market, but most ended up with salaries that could have been attained by going to work in a factory straight out of high school.  

Undermining of Home Ownership

Few metrics demonstrate the end of aspiration better than the decline in home ownership. The parents and grandparents of the millennial generation (born between 1982 and 2002) witnessed a dramatic rise in homeownership; in contrast, by 2016, home ownership among older millennials (25-34) had dropped by 18 percent from 45.4 percent in 2000 to 37 percent in 2016. Without a home, these millennials will face a “formidable challenge” in boosting their net worth. Property remains central to financial security: Homes today account for roughly two-thirds of the wealth of middle-income Americans; home owners have a median net worth more than 40 times that of renters.

Perhaps nowhere is shift more dramatic than in Australia, a country long renowned for both social mobility and widespread home ownership. Between 1981 and 2016, property ownership rates among 25 to 34 year-olds in Australia—a country with a strong tradition of middle- and working-class home ownership—fell from more than 60 percent to 45 percent. This is not, as some suggest, the result of a lack of developable land. Even in the relatively crowded United Kingdom, only six percent of the land is urbanized, while barely three percent of the US and 2.1 percent in Canada is urbanized. It’s less than 0.3 percent of Australia 

So why has home ownership fallen? Largely due to regulations that have placed new affordable housing beyond the reach of younger Australians, something we also see in major cities in Great Britain, the United States, and Canada. In all these places, the main culprit has been “smart growth,” a notion that encourages the reluctant to move closer to dense urban cores and give up the dream of owning a home. 

As a result, Australia’s once affordable cities are now among the world’s most expensive. According to demographer Wendell Cox, prices for homes in Sydney—even in the current downturn—are higher than Los Angeles, London, New York, Singapore, and Washington. These all are cities that by any estimate are more critical in the world economy and far more land constrained. Even Adelaide, an isolated and declining industrial hub, has higher prices based on income than Seattle, one of the world’s most dynamic tech hubs.

The impact on prices has been severe. In Sydney, planning regulations, according to a recent Reserve Bank study, now add 55 percent to the price of a home. In Perth, Melbourne, and Brisbane the impact is also well over $100,000 per house. Australian cities once filled with family-friendly neighborhoods are now dominated by dense apartments. According to projections from the Urban Taskforce, apartments will make up half of Sydney’s dwellings by the mid-century, whereas only one quarter of Sydney dwellings will be family-friendly detached homes. 

These policies are widely supported among planners, academics, and the media; in virtually all countries, the cognitive elites congregate in elite urban centres. Indeed, when I produced data at a recent convention demonstrating that most Australians are continuing to move to the periphery, even in New South Wales, the moderator, Australian Broadcast commentator Ali Moore, described much of suburbia as “the wastelands.” This led one attendee to wonder “what country” she inhabited, given that 80 percent of all Australians live in suburbs, with more than four-fifths of families preferring to live in single family homes.

The Green Agenda

Historically, opposition to suburban lifestyles was based largely on aesthetic, social, or even economic considerations. Today, opponents are preoccupied with “green” and “sustainability” concerns. The environmental magazine Grist envisioned “a hero generation” that will escape the material trap of suburban living and work that engulfed their parents. One magazine editor proudly declared herself to be a part of the GINK generation (as in “green inclinations, no kids”) which not only afforded her a relatively care-free and low-cost adult life, but also “a lot of green good that comes from bringing fewer beings onto a polluted and crowded planet.”

This view is widely shared by both the oligarchy and the upper echelons of the planning clerisy. Like their medieval counterparts, they wish to see a more “ordered” planet, but in ways that do not threaten their own power or quality of life. Those at the top of class pyramid can purchase “indulgences” for their consumption by investing in forests, driving electric cars, solarizing their homes, while their wealth allows them to purchase expensive inner-city flats.    

This meme is applauded by publications like the Australian Financial Review, which insist that millennials do not want to live in suburbia. This is largely specious. In survey after survey, most millennials, in the United States and elsewhere, hope to buy a single-family house. The problem is simply that they can’t afford them, particularly in the highly regulated regions as in California, Australia, Canada, or the UK.   

This sets a stage for a future political conflict. Even in the teeth of policies that seek to discourage suburban growth, in most high-income countries, including Canada, Australia, and the US, suburban tastes remain predominant, and are likely to become more so. In America, among those under 35 who do buy homes, four-fifths choose single-family detached houses. According to a recent National Homebuilders Association report, over 66 percent, including those living in cities, actually prefer in the future to purchase a house in the suburbs. 

From Upward Mobility to Neo-Feudalism

The drive against bourgeois aspirations underpins an emerging neo-feudal system in which people remain renters for life, enjoying their video games or houseplants. This may end the dream of ownership that has defined the middle class for a half millennium, but it could assure a steady profit for the owner class, a rent that would seem appropriate to a medieval landlord. 

French economist Thomas Picketty has suggested that today’s ageing societies exacerbate this pattern. Older people dominate the stock and property assets, forcing up prices to the point that younger generations or newcomers to these countries face growing obstacles to upward mobility. High rents as well as rising house prices make the extension of property ownership increasingly difficult for all but inheritors. 

This receding horizon is generating an ever more feudalistic mentality among the young—those with wealthy parents are far luckier to own a house and enter what one writer calls “the funnel of privilege.” In  America—like Australia, a country whose mythology disdains the power of inherited wealth—millennials are increasingly counting on inheritance for their retirement at a rate three times that of the boomers. Among the youngest cohort, those aged 18 to 22, over 60 percent see inheritance as their primary source of wealth as they age.

A Return to Bourgeois Aspiration

“Young people,” wrote Montesquieu in the mid-eighteenth century, “do not degenerate; this only occurs only after grown men have become corrupt.” By endorsing policies that restrict suburban development and home ownership, planners, investors, and the media are asking the next generation to accept conditions that their predecessors would never have tolerated.

Ultimately, this poses a threat to the powerful democratic ideal that arose in the second half of the last century. Instead of spreading the wealth, many of the leading Silicon Valley oligarchs’ solution to marginalization is to have the state provide housing subsidies as well as unconditional cash stipends to keep the peasants from rising against their betters. 

The oligarchs understandably do not want a populist rebellion from below; the Trump victory and Brexit were demonstrations of that threat. But nor do they worry all that much about being burdened by a call for societal generosity. Such people tend to be skilled at tax avoidance, so they won’t be picking up the bill. Instead, as occurred in the Middle Ages, the taxes will be paid by the remaining middle- and working-class residents, while the regulatory clerisy, both in government and the universities, enjoy cushy pensions and other protections unavailable to the masses. 

The erosion of upward mobility threatens a deepening conflict between the middle orders and the elites. It also threatens the future of liberal democracy. A strong landowning middle order has been essential in democracies from ancient Athens and the Roman and Dutch Republics to contemporary Europe, North America, and Australia. Now with fewer owning land, and many without even a reasonable expectation of acquiring it, we may be entering an era portrayed as progressive and multicultural but that will be ever more feudal in its economic and social form.

Joel Kotkin is a Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His next book, On the Return of Feudalism, will be out early next year from St. Martin’s. 

Photo by Hatham

DREAMING OF AN AMERICA WHERE SOLUTIONS TRUMP IDEOLOGY

by Joel Kotkin 10/13/2019

In the ever-intensifying battle between red and blue, the consultants, fixers and self-serving media thrive, but America suffers.

Now we seem destined to face a graphic battle of extremes between Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren, two self-styled populists best suited to exacerbating polarization while both sides toss around charges of “treason” and embrace the idea of an inevitable civil war.

I dream of a purple America where politics is civil and focuses on solving problems. The good news is that the country is actually far purpler than either red or blue. The most recent survey data shows that a majority of Democrats still consider themselves moderate or conservative while barely one in four see themselves as “very liberal”; among Republicans, despite Trump’s vaunted popularity, roughly 40 percent want their party to move closer to the center.

A wide base for purple politics

Political moderation is far more widespread than many suggest. Sarah Lawrence political scientist Sam Abrams, found, for example, that voters in the South are only slightly more conservative than those in the Northeast. Roughly as many consider themselves moderate as conservative, while a quarter describe themselves as liberal. Similarly, among residents of New England, long a bastion of progressives, barely 31 percent call themselves liberal while over a quarter identify as conservative and 43 percent moderate.

“Self-described moderates control the balance of power in all regions,” Abrams suggests. This is also the case, he notes, if you break down areas by rural, suburban and urban designations. Again, moderates dominate in virtually every category over both liberals and conservative.

So why extreme polarized politics?

Given these realities, how do we end up with choices, such as in 2016 and likely next year, that as Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse put it, are about as “popular as dumpster fires” among voters?

Some of the problem stems from record high alienation from the higher levels of government.

Barely 18 percent of Americans, for example, believe the federal government will do the right thing, a pattern common across all regions. The more powerful and least accountable the institutions — the media, academia and big corporations — the higher the level of distrust.

This has left our national politics largely in the hands of zealots, both right and left, and those for whom politics is often a profitable business. These are the forces driving the committed to ever more ideological hysteria.

Zealots, and those who make their livings from serving them, do not favor political collaboration across party lines. Groups that rally to the far right and left don’t want peaceful dialogue with dissenters. Indeed, the most intolerant of all our political “tribes,” notes one recent Atlantic study, are white social justice warriors, precisely the people who dominate the loud leftish Twitter fringe that drives the party base.

The Purple Tide could be just beginning

In contrast, purple politics would not exploit paranoia and hysteria but seek out practical answers to problems from transportation and housing to energy use and homelessness; it would follow essentially moderate policies that fit the largely suburban middle class.

This requires a new generation of leaders willing to break the ideological paralysis. Critically this includes the great GOP stronghold of Texas. In 2018 many longstanding Republican congressmen and other officials were defeated, as was nearly the polarizing Sen. Ted Cruz. To stem the bleeding, Republican strategist are seeking out more moderate, sensible politicians to deal with an increasingly purple electorate.

Fortunately for the Republicans in Texas, the Democrats seem to be accommodating this strategy by pushing the Texas party further to left, embracing such things as bans on fossil fuels, a mortal threat to their state’s boom. Some, notably in Austin, have adopted policies on homelessness modeled on San Francisco’s, with predictable results on the street that will make for fine GOP propaganda.

This hopefully temporary insanity manifests itself in onetime moderate Beto O’Rourke, who now favors such things as reparations for those arrested for marijuana possession, open borders, as well as essentially nationalizing zoning, a position first embraced by his fellow Texas Democrat, Julian Castro. Between them, these once touted young political stars barely muster 15 percent of the Texas Democratic primary vote, according to a recent poll.

Generally, in gaining public approval, moderate GOP governors do best, and dominate the ranks of the most popular figures in American politics. In contrast, those at the bottom tend to be outspoken progressives, including Gov. Gavin Newsom and similarly left-leaning politicians such as last place finisher Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, although some particularly harsh conservatives, like Kentucky’s Matt Bevin also do poorly.

Political self-interest lies in the center

Purple politics, sadly, is not doing well in the Democratic Party’s presidential race. Elizabeth Warren, with her calls for a vast increase in federal power, as well higher taxes on the middle class, could drive a large number of middle-of-the-road and even working-class voters, including many minorities, to the GOP.

As the liberal columnist Jonathan Chait has observed, many new progressive stances now being adopted by Democrats — reparations, decriminalizing border crossings, health-care coverage to undocumented immigrants, eliminating energy production — are not likely to appeal to even moderate party members, much less independents.

For example, Medicare for all, embraced by Warren, is favored by barely 40 percent of the electorate. Proposals from Democratic candidates to eliminate private cars, end air travel and phase out red meat may not play well outside Manhattan, San Francisco and West Los Angeles. Already, notes The New York Times, the left shift is driving independents away from the party. Some 54 percent of all Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents prefer a more moderate than more liberal party.

The failures of more mainstream candidates, such as Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar and John Hickenlooper, illustrate that the party’s left is far better organized than the center. They appeal, according to a recent YouGov poll, to bread-and-butter issues built around the safety net, jobs and prosperity that moderate Democrats care about.

But the more motivated, and well-organized activists embrace a less saleable agenda of draconian climate-change policies, virtually unregulated abortion and removal of barriers to undocumented immigration. Only the embrace of such extreme and unpopular positions can save the presidency of the clearly unbalanced and deeply unpopular Donald Trump.

Yet purple politics may regain its appeal particularly if Trump is reelected. At some point, the political class will have to recognize that most people don’t care much about “conservative principles,” “saving the planet” or massive schemes to assure “social justice” on the backs of middle-class taxpayers. They want competent government, not politicians who only represent money interests and the organized yammerers within their parties.

Despite the awful choice we are about to have at the top of the ticket, the good news that America is already essentially a purple country, dominated far more by moderation and common sense than the punditry suggests. What we need are political leaders capable of tapping into that reality, both for the own benefit and that of the country.

The Real Conflict Is Not Racial Or Sexual

American Renewal: The Real Conflict Is Not Racial Or Sexual, It’s Between The Ascendant Rich Elites And The Rest Of Us

Grae Stafford-Daily Caller News Foundation

• 398
• Comments

JOEL KOTKINCONTRIBUTOR

September 11, 201910:54 AM ET

Despite the media’s obsession on gender, race and sexual orientation, the real and determining divide in America and other advanced countries lies in the growing conflict between the ascendant upper class and the vast, and increasingly embattled, middle and working classes.

We’ve seen this fight before. The current conflict fundamentally reprises the end of the French feudal era, where the Third Estate, made up of the commoners, challenged the hegemony of the First Estate and Second, made up of the church and aristocracy.

These dynamics are unsettling our politics to the core. Both the gentry left, funded largely by Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and the libertarian right, have been slow to recognize that they are, in de Tocqueville’s term, “sitting on a volcano ready to explode.” The middle class everywhere in the world, notes a recent OECD report, is under assault, and shrinking in most places while prospects for upward mobility for the working class also declines.

The anger of the Third Estate, both the growing property-less Serf class as well as the beleaguered Yeomanry, has produced the growth of populist, parties both right and left in Europe, and the election of Donald Trump in 2016. In the U.S., this includes not simply the gradual, and sometimes jarring,  transformation of the GOP into a vehicle for populist rage, but also the rise on the Democratic side of politicians such as Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, each of whom have made class politics their signature issue. (RELATED: Bernie Sanders Says Middle Class Will Pay More In Taxes)

The Rise of Neo-Feudalism

Today’s neo-feudalism recalls the social order that existed before the democratic revolutions of the 17th and 18th Century, with our two ascendant estates filling the roles of the former dominant classes. The First Estate, once the province of the Catholic Church, has morphed into what Samuel Coleridge in the 1830s called “the Clerisy,” a group that extends beyond organized religion to the universities, media, cultural tastemakers and upper echelons of the bureaucracy. The role of the Second Estate is now being played by a rising Oligarchy, notably in tech but also Wall Street, that is consolidating control of most of the economy.

Together these two classes have waxed  while the Third Estate has declined. This essentially reversed the enormous gains made by the middle and even the working class over the past 50 years. The top 1% in America captured just 4.9 percent of total U.S. income growth in 1945-1973, but since then the country’s richest classes has gobbled up an astonishing 58.7% of all new wealth in the U.S., and 41.8 percent of total income growth during 2009-2015 alone.

In this period, the Oligarchy has benefited from the financialization of the economy and the refusal of the political class in both parties to maintain competitive markets. As a result, American industry has become increasingly concentrated. For example, the five largest banks now account for close to 50 percent of all banking assets, up from barely 30 percent just 20 years ago. (RELATED: The Biggest Bank You’ve Never Heard Of)

The Return to Serfdom

The Return to Serfdom

By JOEL KOTKIN


July 25, 2019 12:29 PM


A steel worker returns to work at U.S. Steel Granite City Works in Granite City, Ill. (Lawrence Bryant/Reuters)

I’m not a free-market fundamentalist. To me, the beauty of liberal capitalism lies in its performance: More people live well, and live longer, than ever before. Millions of working-class people have moved from poverty to become homeowners and have seen their offspring rise into the middle class or higher.

Today this egalitarian capitalist progress is showing signs of fading, not only in the United States but also in Europe, Australia, and increasingly East Asia. This marks a drastic reversal from the conditions that prevailed after World War II, when the incomes of those in the lower quintile surged by roughly 40 percent, while the gains in those in the top quintile grew a modest 8 percent, and the top 5 percent saw their incomes drop slightly. Social mobility since the 1990s has declined dramatically, not only in the United States but also throughout Europe, including Sweden. Despite the European Union’s vaunted welfare state, the middle class has shrunk in more than two-thirds of the countries there.

Less recognized in the media have been the fortunes of China’s working class. Overall, 500 million Chinese, close to 40 percent of the population, remain poor, living on less than $5.50 a day; in 2010 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reported that the Chinese middle class constituted only 12 percent of the population. Rather than replicating the middle-class growth of post–World War II America and Europe, notes researcher Nan Chen, “China appears to have skipped that stage altogether and headed straight for a model of extraordinary productivity but disproportionately distributed wealth like the contemporary United States.”

The working-class future may be further clouded by the loss of what were once respectable, upwardly mobile jobs — postal workers, switchboard operators, manufacturing laborers, computer operators, bank tellers, and travel agents. For the 90 million Americans who work in these kinds of jobs, and their equivalents elsewhere, the future could be bleak.

Even if they find jobs, the decline of private trade unions has weakened the political clout that workers once enjoyed. In virtually all advanced countries, rates of unionization have dropped; since 1985, the portion of unionized workers among all the higher-income countries dropped from 30 to below 20 percent. There are unions in China, but membership is essentially worthless, because they have little power and must conform to the party’s priorities.

Many working-class people have descended into what has been described as the “precariat,” a group of workers who have limited control over the length of their workday and often live on barely subsistence wages. Research reveals that 20 to 30 percent of the working-age population in the United States and the EU-15 (the 15 member states of the EU as of April 2004), or up to 162 million individuals, does such work.

Conditions for these workers represent a throwback to earlier times. In ultra-expensive places such as Silicon Valley, many conditional workers live in their cars. The typical Uber driver is not the one seen in ads, the middle-class driver picking up extra cash for a family vacation or to pay for a fancy date; most depend on their “gigs” for their livelihood. Nearly half of gig workers in California live under the poverty line. These workers often face a dismal future as they age; only one-third of independent contractors in the U.K., for example, have any sort of pension savings for their retirement.

Critically, the traditional bulwarks of working-class community — religious institutions, neighborhood and social groups, unions, and extended family — are all weakening. Marriages among the upper classes may be getting more stable and less likely to dissolve but take place later, as sociologist Stephanie Coontz has noted. But the situation is different among the middle and working classes; overall, as many as one-third of the births in the U.S. take place outside matrimony.

In some heavily minority urban areas, the rate of children born to unmarried mothers reaches an astronomical 80 percent, but this is becoming commonplace in once-traditional working-class-white areas as well. The rate of single parenting is the most significant predictor of social immobility, according to a study led by the Stanford economist Raj Chetty. Princeton sociologist Sara McLanahan has found a similar pattern in Europe.

Economic collapse is a clear contributor to this phenomenon. A detailed 2017 study by economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson shows that towns and counties that lose manufacturing jobs also see marriage rates decline, while the share of children living in single-parent homes and the rate of births to unmarried parents rise. As in the 19th century, working-class people face mounting health problems and issues of substance abuse, particularly in old industrial areas such as Scotland. In the United States among low-educated, middle-aged whites, mortality rates are increasing, mostly as a result of what the Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton call “deaths of despair.”

Even in Asia, there are signs of social collapse. According to a recent survey by the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs, half of all Korean households have experienced some form of family crisis, many involving debt, job loss, or issues relating to child or elder care. Similar strains can be seen in Japan, with a rising “misery index” of divorces, single mothers, and spousal and child abuse — all of which exacerbate the country’s disastrous demographic decline and growing class division.

In “classless” China, a massive class of migrant workers — over 280 million — inhabit a netherworld of substandard housing, unsteady work, and miserable environmental conditions, all after leaving their offspring behind in villages. These new serfs vastly outnumber the Westernized, highly educated Chinese whom most Westerners encounter.

Researcher Li Sun at the University of Leeds estimates that there are 60 million “left-behind children” and another 58 million “left-behind elderly” in China. Cut off from their families and the company of women, migrant workers suffer rates of venereal disease far higher than the national norms. Scott Rozelle, a professor at Stanford, found that most kids left behind in the rural villages are sick or malnourished and that up to two-thirds struggle with combinations of anemia, worms, and uncorrected myopia, which set them back at school. More than half the toddlers, he predicts, are so cognitively delayed that their IQs will never exceed 90 — portending a future akin to that of gammas and epsilons in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

In the West, the deterioration of working-class conditions has already sparked what could be described as “peasant rebellions.” Reacting to the arrogance and disdain of the globalized urban upper crust, these voters drove the election of Donald Trump, the support for Brexit, and the rise of populist parties across Europe.

In France, a clear majority regards globalization as a threat, but most executives, many trained at elite schools, see it as an “opportunity.” Protests of the so-called gilets jaunes (yellow vests) against higher gas taxes in the winter of 2018–19 demonstrated the depth of this anger; the movement may have started in small towns and industrial cities, but it also won over the Paris suburbs, home to roughly 80 percent of the capital region’s population.

Like the revolutionaries of 1789, those in the contemporary French third estate (the commoners) have been stirred by the hypocrisy of their betters. In pre-revolutionary times, French aristocrats and top clerics preached Christian modesty while indulging in gluttony, sexual adventurism, and lavish spending. Today they call for working- and middle-class abstemiousness while they live large and exempt themselves by paying their modern version of “green” indulgences through carbon credits and other virtue-signaling devices.

We may be, as Tocqueville wrote in the 1840s, “sleeping on a volcano” destined to explode. The imposition of the Green New Deal proposed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — which would effectively mandate the end of many industries, from fossil fuels to aerospace to cattle ranching — would likely spark a mass rebellion in middle America. The “green” policies so appealing to a Silicon Valley billionaire, an investment banker, or a grant-seeking scientific researcher seem more like class warfare to residents of Youngstown, Ohio, the Ruhr in Germany, or, increasingly, China’s blue-collar cities.

China, with a history replete with violent peasant rebellions, could be the most important flash point. Workers increasingly stage strikes and protests. Communist officials have been put in the awkward position of cracking down at universities on Marxist study groups whose working-class advocacy conflicts with the policies imposed by the nominally socialist government.

In China, a rebellion would probably replace one form of authoritarian rule for another. In the West, it could undermine stable democracies. We may be seeing a reprise of what historian Eric Weitz describes as the “proletarianization” of the German middle class, which set the stage for the rise of National Socialism.

The rise of right-wing, even neo-fascist movements in Europe parallels the historic tragedies of the Fascist era, but, equally important, the liberal order is also threatened by an increasingly militant, radical leftist upsurge. In France the former Trotskyite Jean-Luc Mélenchon won the under-24 vote, beating the “youthful” Emmanuel Macron by almost two to one among this age group. Similarly, in the United Kingdom, the birthplace of modern capitalism, Labour, under the neo-Marxist Jeremy Corbyn, won more than 60 percent of voters under 40, compared with just 23 percent for the Conservatives. Similar trends are evident in Germany and the rest of Western Europe, where the Green parties, with a program of draconian social engineering, enjoy wide youth support.

Socialism is on the rise even in the United States. A 2016 poll by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that 44 percent of American Millennials favored socialism, while another 14 percent chose fascism or Communism. By 2024, these Millennials will be by far the biggest voting bloc.

Ultimately societies, notably democratic ones, need to instill hope among the majority for a brighter future. But our dominant classes increasingly see little need for the masses. As one Silicon Valley venture capitalist told me at a California environmental conference, the future won’t have much need for people; we’ll have robots and an elite class, which naturally will include his children.


Yet people are not fungible or easily replaced. The “great question” that “hovers” over society, suggests Kentucky-based poet and novelist Wendell Berry, lies fundamentally in “the question of what are people for.” In embracing the “absolute premium of labor-saving measures” and loyally serving the needs of the least needful, we are undermining the social basis of both democracy and capitalism, creating an expanding market for ever more dependence on the state while undermining the dignity of large parts of our populations.

JOEL KOTKIN teaches as a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University (Orange, CA) and is the executive editor of the widely-read website NewGeography.com. He is the author of seven previous books, and a regular contributor to The Daily Beast and Forbes.com.
IN THIS ISSUE

Why is there so much opposition to Single Family Homes?

In Defense of Houses

Single-family homes are the backbone of American aspiration—so why do so many people oppose them?

Joel KotkinWendell CoxJuly 16, 2019
Economy, finance, and budgets
California


A critical component in the rise of market-oriented democracy in the modern era has been the dispersion of property ownership among middle-income households—not just in the United States but also in countries like Holland, Canada, and Australia, where it was closely linked with greater civil and economic freedom. In its early days, this dispersion was largely rural, but after the Second World War, it took on a largely suburban emphasis in the U.S., including within the extended metro regions of traditional cities like New York and Los Angeles. American homeownership soared between 1940 and 1962, from 44 percent to 63 percent.

Today, the aspiration of regular people to own homes—arguably one of the greatest achievements of postwar democracy—is fading. But the dilution of this key aspect of the American dream is not the result of market conditions or changing preferences, but rather the concerted effort of planners and pundits. California offers the most striking example. Housing affordability was once a hallmark of life in the Golden State, but over the past three decades, and particularly since the imposition of draconian climate policies, stringent land-use regulations have driven up land prices so much that middle-income, single-family housing is now virtually impossible to build, helping make prices of existing homes prohibitive. Median house prices in the state’s coastal metropolitan areas (Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, and San Jose) have risen to nearly 250 percent above the national average, according to the 2017 American Community Survey. Median gross rents, which tend to follow house prices, are more than 75 percent higher than the national average. According to the National Association of Realtors, it takes a household income of $273,000—almost five times the national average—to qualify for the median-priced house in the San Jose metropolitan area. In San Francisco, an income of $208,000 is needed. In San Diego, it’s $138,000, and in Los Angeles, $122,000—both more than double the national average.

Many younger people, wanting to live and work in the wealthy metros, have little choice but to become permanent renters, usually in smaller apartments. In California’s San Jose metropolitan area (Silicon Valley), homeownership among post-college millennials (aged 25 to 34) dropped by 40 percent in 25 years, compared with a less than 20 percent national drop during that same period. Few are saving sufficiently to make homeownership a reality. Millennials with college debt would need up to 27 years to accumulate enough for a down payment in the San Francisco metro area, according to one study.

Without owning a home, however, younger people face major obstacles to boosting their net worth, because property remains crucial to long-term financial security. Homes today account for roughly two-thirds of the wealth of middle-income Americans, and homeowners have a median net worth more than 85 times that of renters, according to the Census Bureau. Lower homeownership rates are a major reason why (according to2014 Census numbers) black households had a median net worth of just $10,000 and Hispanic households just $18,000. By contrast, white, non-Hispanic households had a median net worth of $130,000. Asians were even more affluent, at $157,000.

Seeking to address the crisis of affordability in prosperous metro areas, California’s recently shelved SB50, sponsored by state senator Scott Wiener, would have overridden local zoning by allowing fourplexes (four-unit apartment buildings) to be built in areas zoned for single-family dwellings. But SB50, operating on the assumption that increasing the supply of units would be enough to bring housing costs within reason, didn’t address other state and local regulations and fees that constrain housing supply, including measures that have blocked expansion of lower-density housing construction on the urban fringe. Urbanist Alain Bertaud has described how such regulations can worsen housing shortages, raising costs in both urban and suburban areas and harming the poor especially. As we’ve noted elsewhere, prior to the adoption of such measures, California’s housing prices weren’t that much higher than the national average, during a period when the state’s population was expanding rapidly.

Some of the support for such measures is openly hostile to single-family housing. Social-justice advocates, for their part, maintain that, since single-family neighborhoods have been historically white, their perpetuation is thus racist, as Seattle’s leftist weekly The Stranger contends. But we’re not living in Jim Crow times. Even in deep-South Atlanta, more than 70 percent of blacks and Hispanics live in the outer suburbs, where single-family housing predominates.In the 53 metropolitan areas with more than 1 million residents, more than two-thirds of blacks and Hispanics now live in lower-density outer metropolitan areas. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine policies more disadvantageous to blacks and Hispanics than California-style land-use regulations, which have pushed up median house prices well beyond their grasp. Another source of opposition to single-family housing comes from today’s density activists, who claim that living close together fosters greater community spirit and positive social results. Yet surveys continue to find suburbanites more satisfied with their living conditions than those in the urban core or rural areas.

The most persistent opponents of middle-class, single-family housing, though, are the Greens. The environmental magazine Grist envisions millennials as a “hero generation” that will escape the material trap of suburban living and work that engulfed their parents, despite surveys and migration data demonstrating the opposite. That most families still prefer such housing is problematic, since, as one Grist editor put it, “a lot of green good comes from bringing fewer beings onto a polluted and crowded planet”—in other words, single-family homes encourage people to have more kids. Indeed, there is an association between suburbia and fertility: Census Bureau data show that people living in high-density neighborhoods have fewer offspring and are less likely to be married.

In fact, suburban houses, according to data in one Australian study (conducted by coauthor Cox’s consultancy), use less energy than do the dwellings of inner-city urbanites. As British scholar Hugh Byrd has noted, suburban roofs would be ideal places to site photovoltaic solar technology. In the future, he suggests, if this usage becomes commonplace, “suburbia will have a renewed role as both a collector and supplier of energy, a characteristic that cannot be achieved in the higher density CBD [Central Business District].”

Such opposition to single-family housing is occurring even as millennials, many entering their thirties, are demonstrating a preference for lower-density living. Since 2010, 80 percent of millennial population growth has been in the suburbs. Some of this is simply demographics: most people with young children, or contemplating the prospect of having children, prefer single-family houses. Nearly three-quarters of millennials want single-family detached houses, according to a 2019 report on homebuyer preferences by the National Association of Homebuilders. A 2018 Apartment List survey found that 80 percent of millennials aspire to homeownership.

These preferences can be seen in the marketplace. In America, among those under 35 who buy homes, four-fifths choose single-family detached houses. Since 2010, a net 1.8 million people have moved away from the urban-core counties of major metropolitan areas, largely to lower-density counties, where single-family houses predominate.

A strong land-owning middle order has been essential in democracies going back to ancient Athens and the Roman and Dutch republics, to say nothing of the United States. It was essential to the thinking of the Founding Fathers and writers such as Alexis de Tocqueville. Today, often through deliberate policy, we are undermining this critical property-owning middle class—and impeding not only the economic future and family prospects of a young generation but also the wellsprings of liberal democracy. If the trend persists, America will become increasingly feudal in its economic and social form.

Joel Kotkin is the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His latest book is The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us. Wendell Cox is the principal of Demographia, a public-policy consultancy, and a senior fellow at the Center for Opportunity Urbanism.