End of the ‘Ownership Society’

Remember the ownership society? President George W. Bush championed the concept when he was running for re-election in 2004, envisioning a world in which every American family owned a house and a stock portfolio, and government stayed out of the way of the American Dream.

These families were, of course, conservative, or at a minimum traditional and nuclear, consisting of a heterosexual married couple and at least two kids living in a stand-alone home with a yard, a car or two and a multimedia room with a flat-screen television. The latter was a new addition to this 21st-century simulacrum of the 1950s "Leave It to Beaver" idyll. But the dream was the same.

Such a country would be more stable, Bush argued, and more prosperous. "America is a stronger country every single time a family moves into a home of their own," he said in October 2004. To achieve his vision, Bush pushed new policies encouraging homeownership, like the "zero-down-payment initiative," which was much as it sounds—a government-sponsored program that allowed people to get mortgages without a down payment. More exotic mortgages followed, including ones with no monthly payments for the first two years. Other mortgages required no documentation other than the say-so of the borrower. Absurd though these all were, they paled in comparison to the financial innovations that grew out of the mortgages—derivatives built on other derivatives, packaged and repackaged until no one could identify what they contained and how much they were, in fact, worth.

As we know by now, these instruments have brought the global financial system, improbably, to the brink of collapse. And as financial strains drive husbands and wives apart, Bush's ownership ideology may end up having the same effect on the stable nuclear families conservatives so badly wanted to foster.

The dream of a better society through homeownership didn't originate with George W. Bush. It's as American as Manifest Destiny. The Homestead Act in 1862 offered acres to anyone willing to brave the Western frontier. During Reconstruction, freed slaves were promised "40 acres and a mule." And after World War II, with Levittown and its cousins, affordable homes were a reward of victory. But until very recently, those hopes and dreams were connected to actual income and gainful employment. No longer.

The giddiness of the Bush years built on the promise of the New Economy era, a promise perfectly encapsulated by a 1999 billboard advertising a shiny new subdivision in Scroggins, Texas, filled with homes that most of their owners couldn't really afford: YES, YOU CAN HAVE IT ALL! That dream took a sharp hit with the collapse of the Internet stock bubble in 2000-2001 and then with 9/11, both of which destroyed billions of dollars of wealth. But it came roaring back in 2002, encouraged by Bush's post-9/11 exhortation that Americans could do their patriotic duty by going shopping and paying lower taxes, even as government spending exploded. Shop they did, and homes they bought.

The spree wasn't confined to the United States. Britain has its own version of the ownership society, which received a boost from Margaret Thatcher, who promoted "a property-owning democracy" that her Labour successors, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, endorsed. Blair liked to talk of building a "stakeholder economy" with a big role for the ordinary property-owning citizen. More recently, Brown has spoken of creating a "homeowning, asset-owning, wealth-owning democracy." Millions were happy to buy into the vision. Tenants of government-owned properties gladly took up Thatcher's offer to sell them their homes at knockdown prices. More than 70 percent of Britons now own their homes, compared with 40 percent of Germans and 50 percent of French.