The Housing Theory of Everything

What happens when the core organizing principle of American society is tested.

THE MOST POWERFUL FANTASIES are the ones that seem so natural and obvious that it’s hard to imagine a reality apart from them—in other words, the ones that don’t feel like fantasies at all. I’m talking, of course, about the American Dream^®, and by the American Dream^®, of course I mean home ownership.

The home ownership society was designed to bolster the feeling, if not the reality, of middle-class wealth. As a result, a 2025 working paper called “Giving Up” suggests that the feeling, if not the reality, of exclusion from that wealth produces a cascade of economic consequences: that the “perceived probability of attaining home ownership” is such a universally potent catalyst that it changes how people “live, work, and plan for the future,” reshaping the economy in the process.

Renters tend to believe home ownership is “within reach” when their net worth exceeds $300,000, the paper’s authors find, but strange things happen just below this threshold, in that paltry quarter-million zone.¹ Between $200,000 and $300,000, a pattern of behavioral quirks emerges, a Bermuda Triangle of wealth where signals of fiscal prudence jam and good intentions mysteriously vanish from radar. Those in this range self-report higher incidences of a few unsavory habits and beliefs conducted in the grand tradition of fuck it, why not, from an increased likelihood of investing in cryptocurrency² to spending more on their credit cards and espousing an attitude that hard work doesn’t matter. Hard work, that Protestant ideal so central to the American ethos, appears to be abandoned when the even-more-central ideal—private property—seems unattainable.

The paper (full title: “‘Giving Up’: The Impact of Decreasing Housing Affordability on Consumption, Work Effort, and Investment”) earned somber coverage across a spate of serious newspapers and magazines, in part because home ownership is among our few remaining bipartisan values. The Washington Post reported the findings with the headline that “abandoning homeownership” was “changing how people behave at work and home.” The Financial Times concluded the housing crisis was “pushing Gen Z into crypto and economic nihilism.” In The Atlantic, the paper was cited in an article about the “oligarchy of old people” to suggest that “feeling locked out of owning a home casts a malaise.” Housing unaffordability has been tied to everything from quiet quitting to the proliferation of sports betting apps, a loose extension of the so-called “housing theory of everything,” published in 2021 in Works in Progress magazine, that says housing shortages are not merely about affordability, but about “inequality, climate change, low productivity growth, obesity, and even falling fertility rates,” a laundry list of real and imagined crises, each of which is supposedly downstream from the gauntlet of the housing market.³

THE HOME, IT SHOULD BE SAID, IS A SYMBOL as much as it is a shelter. There’s hardly a synecdoche for the American dream more evocative and recognizable than that of the white picket fence, a border concerned for most of its history as much with who it kept out as what it enclosed. That the dream of home ownership is so powerful a motivator that its elusiveness could throw society as we know it into a tailspin is a neat and appealing story, the kind engineered to be clicked and shared and bemoaned, a perfect example of “that which you do not need evidence to believe.”

While I initially found the premise plausible, I became more interested in the explanation’s appeal after I saw that Tyler Cowen (whose recent tracts for The Free Press include “You’ll Learn to Love AI Writing” and “The Folly of ‘Affordability’ Politics”) endorsed “Giving Up” as “one of the best, most interesting, and most important papers” he’d ever read. Cowen is a libertarian, a self-styled free-thinking contrarian who loves capitalism and thinks universal healthcare would hurt young people. That Cowen and I—maintaining our radically different perspectives on class, power, and systems—could both seamlessly integrate these insights into our worldviews only underscores the ubiquity of home ownership supremacy in our collective consciousness.

But further investigation of the paper’s data reveals, as it often does, that we’re talking about vanishingly small differences in self-reported attitudes: 2–3% of homeowners report believing that it’s fine to put forth low effort at work, compared to 4–6% of renters slogging through the nadir of pessimism that is being a quarter-millionaire without a mortgage. Usually, this is reported as “double the rate,” which can obfuscate the fact that a more meaningful takeaway might be that up to 96% of the demoralized group still believes working hard is important. I could speculate about what it is about this particular level of wealth that causes up to 6% of those surveyed to feel despondent about their chances, but each explanation is less interesting than what that despondency tells us about the role housing has assumed in the American psyche.

Embedded in the analysis of the paper is the belief that home ownership—whether as a hurdle one has already cleared, or, more powerfully, expects to clear in the future—leads to superior financial behavior, behavior a GDP-ravenous country would want to cultivate. In the controlled environment of the statistical model, material conditions are largely downstream of such behavior, which is itself downstream of beliefs. This situates the thesis in pretty comfortable opposition to a materialist interpretation, which says our beliefs are shaped by nothing as much as our material conditions. (Tellingly, the authors lightly advise against “transfers targeted only to the poorest households,” which would be unlikely to “move people across the threshold where they start behaving differently.”) In summary, the study suggests a subsidy to boost a subset of close-enough renters above what it identifies as the “giving-up threshold,” noting that such a transfer would “reduc[e] reliance on the social safety net.” The idea, as I understand it, is that getting moderately affluent renters over this hump of ennui will have permanent positive effects on the economy writ large. Home ownership is presumed the only carrot large enough to produce such outcomes.

Couched as it is in language about promoting self-sufficiency, the prescription still earned scorn in the comments sections of blogs like Cowen’s among those who conclude the paper’s suggested causality between home ownership and prudent investment behavior is likely backwards. It’s not that owning a home makes you behave better, one person named “Other M” wrote, but that “people who behave better are more likely to own a home.” Other M’s logic relies on an idea offered elsewhere in the article discussion that those who own homes “display patience” and “a long-term orientation” that would be undermined if subsidies were doled out willy-nilly.

But the correlation between property ownership and virtuous behavior is almost certainly looser than that between property ownership and being located on a well-positioned branch of a prosperous family tree. The fear that subsidies will create poor behavioral outcomes by distorting the work ethic that would have otherwise propelled a young renter to the vaunted propertied class seems invalidated by the data about how first-time homeowners already buy homes: More than half of homeowners under the age of 45 received a subsidy, so to speak, in accordance with the RPAP, or the Rich Parents Assistance Plan: 56% of millennial and 78% of Gen Z homeowners bought their home with the assistance of family money, according to a May 2026 LendingTree survey.⁴ Half of this group received more than 40% of the down payment. In that sense, the paper’s policy prescription shouldn’t be debated in terms of whether to introduce home ownership subsidies—which are functionally more common than not as it is—but whether to standardize them.

I’m dragging us through this subsidization digression not to make an argument for or against it, but to underscore the many ways our shared mythology of the American dream—who attains it, how, when, and why—tends to deviate substantially from the boring facts on the ground. The ideology is so powerful and all-encompassing that we rarely recognize it as such, instead dismissing these contradictory facts even when they’re plainly cataloged before us.

I noticed this for the first time when I published my original rent vs. buy analysis half a decade ago to an unusually impassioned response. It’s practically a rule of financial publishing that if you’re light on pageviews, you should post something about a young renter eschewing home ownership in favor of investing elsewhere. Read any article of this nature in virtually any newspaper or magazine, and you’ll be greeted at the end by an uprising of longtime owners wielding HOA-compliant pitchforks, insisting the author is either too young or too liberal or too stupid to know any better. There’s no other topic in the entire realm of what we call “financial literacy” that enjoys such a high-octane rejection of basic math, no other cost-benefit calculation that routinely causes otherwise-analytical grown-up readers of financial news, pink with exasperation, to wave away the clinical compounding returns charts for the warm embrace of conventional wisdom. As custom dictates, I must now disclaim: There are plenty of good reasons to buy a home, but high ROI is rarely among them, and that’s fine.

THAT RENTING AND INVESTING WHAT'S LEFT OVER in the stock market tends to produce better financial outcomes holds true so long as you’re disciplined enough to invest the difference consistently, which virtually nobody is. This lends some credence to the “forced savings” argument for a mortgage, even if the vast majority of mortgage payments (and the accumulating peripheral costs) during the average ownership tenure are as unrecoverable as rent, absorbed as they are by insurance and financing costs and property taxes, or otherwise trips to Lowe’s and coercing the HVAC repairman to just top up the Freon and call it a day. It’s an undeniably good inflation hedge. Still, most of the supposed gains from ownership come from levering up 5x (otherwise known as putting 20% down and borrowing the rest) and outright ignoring all the transaction expenses that bookend your time in a given residence. But that’s all boring shit. A few homeowners get lucky, others break even, and many—most, if we’re running a stringent rent-and-invest counterfactual—will actually end up slightly in the negative, even if the home appreciates on paper. Why, then, does the myth of home ownership’s financial supremacy persist, despite so much evidence to the contrary?

One potential conclusion: The association between home ownership and the core fantasy of the American middle class runs deeper than money. Money is merely the ill-fitting, all-purpose justification for its persistence. This is close to a clean inverse of the argument I usually find myself constructing, where some cultural object of fascination that appears to be about something else is in fact about wealth, or class, or economics. This is my own housing theory of everything: This enormous, leveraged, and amortized purchase has, somehow, become the beginning and end of the American dream, a shared illusion, a Bermuda Triangle of its own.

There’s something about home ownership—the sense that I am here, I am really here, and I am here to stay—that permits all manner of irrational behavior and belief, appealing as it does to our sense of belonging, permanence, tradition, conformity, ascendance, legacy, even fear of death. Understood in these terms, the suggestion that exclusion from this manufactured rite of passage would radically alter one’s personal values system seems not just believable, but outright inevitable. A home of one’s own activates something in us beyond the grasp of that calculating and sophisticated frontal lobe, appealing instead to somewhere deep inside the shadowy crawlspace of our brains that, as with all good propaganda, feels so innate, so instinctual, as to be irrefutable.

---

This issue was brought to you by Betterment.

Open any individual investing account (including an IRA) with Betterment and make a deposit, and you can earn up to $2,000—on Betterment.

If you’ve been dragging your feet on…

• Opening a new investing account for flexible goals that you can feel confident about consistently contributing to (for a deep dive on why I believe a “non-retirement” investing account is a must, check out my deep dive on how taxable accounts can go toe-to-toe with Roth IRAs)

• Consolidating a bundle of old investing accounts that are scattered here, there, and everywhere so you can keep your money in one, transparent place

• Rolling over that old 401(k) plan that’s been sitting untouched from two employers ago

…then you should know that Betterment has a new client offer where you can earn up to a $2,000 reward when you deposit or roll over at least $1,000 into a new Betterment investment account. Just make your deposits within 45 days of account opening to earn your reward.

Paid client. Views may not be representative. See App Store & Google Play reviews. Learn more. Investing involves risk. Performance not guaranteed.

Betterment is the investing and savings platform for people who want to set their investments on easy mode. With Betterment, you’ll get:

• A properly diversified portfolio of index ETFs suited to your risk tolerance and timeline in as little as three minutes

• Automated rebalancing, reinvestment of dividends, and tax-loss harvesting, so you can focus on what matters

• And of course, an easy-to-use interface that doesn’t look like it was created in Windows 1999

Get started in minutes today.

---

• Shopping from a library computer might mean getting lower prices, but the evidence is mixed. Either way, surveillance pricing feels like a ship that’s already sailed for me, because I’ve played way too fast and loose with my data. (Mozilla Foundation)

• The average US household spent an estimated $1,000 more in 2025 because of tariffs. Now the government is refunding corporations, to the tune of $100 billion. Customers, the trade law experts say, don’t have much hope of seeing any of it. (Washington Post)

• Taylor Swift and Lana del Rey’s weddings as two interpretations of the American Girl dream, both demonstrating how extreme wealth liberates one to behave as tackily as they please. Once again, Grazie Sophia Christie’s new column is a treat. I only wish she’d write weekly. (The Point)

• How Caro Claire Burke wrote the biggest book of the year. Let the record reflect I take full credit for all 1.4 million copies sold. (New Yorker)

The screenshot that will, in turn, be a huge source of stability for me, in an ouroboros of support and mental illness.

• 2,500 years of American history, Sam Kriss-style. Sometimes I read his work and feel like it’s insulting to the craft to call myself a writer. About the veracity of this country’s preferred origin story (one sentence, by the way):

“If that were true, then that would mean that the United States is a propositional nation that no longer believes in its own proposition, can barely even comprehend what those dead men in wigs once meant by liberty or enlightenment, the idea of humanity growing out of its self-imposed childhood, because the realisation of that idea is a society of children, scared in the world, desperately wanting someone to tell them what to do, some vast impersonal system of rewards to tell them what to desire, a society that can’t recognise itself in the mirror of history, left with nothing at all, just the world’s biggest cars, the world’s firmest tits, the world’s most overflowing supermarkets, the world’s most advanced bombs falling on distant villages on the other side of the world.”

• Does hating influencers make you a misogynist? Diabolical Lies investigates Paige Lorenze’s Instagram history and the feminist question of “influence”:

Does Hating Influencers Make You a Misogynist?

---

🤓 New customers can earn up to a $2,000 reward when you deposit or roll over into any individual investing account (including Roth and traditional IRAs) with Betterment. You can get a properly diversified portfolio of index ETFs suited to your risk tolerance, automated rebalancing, and tax-loss harvesting. Get started in as little as 3 minutes.

1. Why this level of wealth would induce feelings of nihilism that one doesn’t feel in, say, the sub-$50,000 tranche is unclear. I’d regale you with my hunches, but this piece is long enough.

2. While investing in crypto increases steadily with wealth among homeowners, the trend for renters is peculiar, spiking in this $200,000–$300,000 range, then plummeting again.

3. I argued recently that the housing crisis is a product of a very simple cybernetics principle: The purpose of a system is what it does. There’s no point in arguing that a system was intended to do anything other than what it consistently tends to do (in this case, protect existing home values). Another hotly debated 2025 paper found that it was income growth, not supply elasticity, that most reliably predicted housing prices. In other words, unlike what the “Housing Theory of Everything” piece argues about inequality as one symptom among many of housing unaffordability, these findings suggest it’s the primary cause.

4. This sample size is smaller than I’d like it to be, but the numbers are in the same ballpark as other surveys find, like this one from 2019.