Understanding Our Obsession
With Homes and Real Estate

During the boom years, books about striking it rich in real estate, as well as designing and decorating our abodes, were stacked up in bookstores like bricks. Now that the party is long over, more sober assessments on our national obsession with shelter are hitting the shelves.

"Craving Community: The New American Dream" by Todd W. Mansfield, Ross P. Yockey and L. Beth Yockey (Abecedary Press, 2007). Suburbia has been satirized as sterile almost as long as it has existed, but now it has a new label: Community Deprivation Syndrome. Drawing from sociological studies and adding anecdotes from themselves and others, the authors replow well-worn ground: that people were not meant to live in isolation -- and that car-driven suburban land planning, along with the Internet, keep us in isolated cocoons, watching videos in our home theaters rather than going to the movies and having wine in our cellars rather than bars, locked away from our neighbors, rather than fostering healthy relationships in more nurturing village settings.

No news here; everybody's already aware that we've been bowling alone for years. Some of the examples that the authors give, however -- like the lonely condo owner who died and dried up into a mummy before his neighbors noticed he was missing -- are compelling.

So what's the answer? For many community planners, it's a return to village life known variously as Traditional New Developments, New Urbanism and Smart Growth, ideas which have been tried, though not widely adopted, since the early 1980s. The book comprehensively reviews these attempts, though not with a very critical eye (not surprising, since the lead author, Todd Mansfield, helped lead the movement as president of the Walt Disney Company development division that created Celebration, one of the hallmark communities in this genre).

Making a walkable community that integrates all the necessities of life --including shops, offices, homes and green space -- is an admirable goal. Why, then, isn't that sort of plan now the norm? One reason is that it's a strategic nightmare and daunting to all but the deepest pockets, both facts that this book glosses over. Similarly, achieving a satisfying integration of housing and services may not be possible when a community is first developed, no matter how well-intentioned the planners. The villages that the planners turn to for their inspiration, in places like England's Cotswolds or Italy's Tuscany, took centuries to reach their current forms.

Mr. Mansfield is chairman of the Urban Land Institute, which wrestles with the big questions of how communities should be made. So it's not surprising that much of this book seems directed to developers, zoning officials and land planners, rather than homeowners, who really don't have much say about whether a coffee shop will be built within walking distance of their home or whether their porch will abut their neighbors'. Nevertheless, the book is a well-researched review of the roots of suburban loneliness and sends a message that bears repeating to those who create our communities: It takes a village to make a village. 

"House Lust: American's Obsession with Our Homes" by Daniel McGinn (Doubleday, 2007). Given our lack of community and our isolation, it's not surprising that Americans are obsessed about our homes.

Author Daniel McGinn, a Newsweek writer, adopts the persona of a naïf as he travels through familiar tropes -- the new home, the cramped apartment, the flip, the ratty rental, the vacation house and the timeshare -- interviewing builders, brokers, sellers, buyers and looky-loos across the country.

His goal, he says, is to understand why we babble on about our abodes at cocktail parties, TiVo home and design shows, keep track of celebrity home sales, waste our weekends visiting neighbors' open houses and ripping out our own drywall to install the latest shower spa, and sneak time looking at Internet listings of island homes at our office desks -- in short, why we've become almost pathologically fixated on shelter.

Part of the reason is financial, of course, as homeowners increasingly see their homes as nest eggs rather than just nests, but as Mr. McGinn observes, it's more than that: the renovators who show off their remodeling pictures as aggressively as some parents show baby pictures, McMansion owners who decide they can't live without two dishwashers, middle-class workers who decorate their vacation homes to appeal to renters, then decide they can't bear to have strangers staying in them.

Mr. McGinn's  reporter's eye is sharp and often touchingly funny, as when he recounts how a solemn kindergartner told his parents, wrangling over a botched home-theater installation, "Guys, you have to calm down." But as entertaining as his Candide-like tour of the housing landscape is, the meaning of it all is missing. As Mr. McGinn writes in his final chapter: "For decades, owning a house has been marketed as the American Dream -- and as anyone knows who's woken up halfway through a surreal, incoherent narrative knows, dreams don't always make sense."

In that case, why write a book at all?

-- June Fletcher is a staff reporter at The Wall Street Journal and the author of "House Poor" (Harper Collins, 2005). Her "House Talk" column appears most Mondays on RealEstateJournal.com. Email your questions about the residential real-estate market. Please include your name, city and state. If you don't want your name used in our column, please indicate that. Due to volume of mail received, we regret that we cannot answer every question.

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