Homeowners, Foreclosures, and the Matrix

There is a term in the home construction industry today, ‘spec house’. It refers to homes built by speculating contractors that do not yet have buyers. They are built rampantly in housing bubbles on the supposition that buyers will be plentiful.

What we would have to insist upon today is the rise of a new kind of ‘spec individual’; in a situation like ours today, in which home ownership and the individual are integrated concepts (the culmination of the ideas of John Locke that citizenship and ownership are intimately linked concepts), the owner-individual becomes a specter.

When the prediction is that in the coming months one in seven homes will go into foreclosure, it is time to deliver the verdict on the “ownership society” which George W. Bush promoted when seeking election for President: sham.

The owner-individual has become the prop for a bewildering network of lending products and finance circuits entangled in complex abstractions. Like the spec house, the speculative individual in an opportunistic housing market structured by uneven exchange relations is constituted as a risk, a speculation, a future asset that may or may not pan out.

When markets fail, inflation hits, wages drop and rates climb, spec individualities are left as empty and contentless as the evacuated homes they leave behind.

The image of millions of Americans turning out the lights and walking away from pristine colonials and capes and ranch homes across the country, like wandering souls, is striking.

In The Matrix, those pristine realities turned out to be illusions, albeit very comfortable ones. Behind the illusion we learned that humans were used as batteries. And the matrix, their false reality, served an important function: its purpose was to keep the humans docile and subjected as their energies were extracted for the use of others.

The Matrix, believe it or not, is an altogether appropriate analogy to the current housing crisis. First-time home buyers were seduced by lax and deceptive lending and by the promise of the guarantee of rising home values. They bought homes and lifestyles they couldn’t afford, and Americans became very accustomed to the feasibility of doing that as long as home values were artificially inflating.

Meanwhile, investment corporations made billions off of the desperate dreams of ordinary people whose wages were dropping amidst rising costs but who wanted, and really deserved, a little Matrix of their own.

It is perhaps curious that something so tangible, like the house, can be so fictitious, can vanish into thin air overnight. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In future posts I begin to explore alternative approaches to dwelling, where the goal is to make the financing, designing, locating, spacing, decorating, and use of the modern home a more fulfilling and sustainable endeavor.

Stumble It!

~ by Shane Waggoner on December 11, 2008.