Lehe: Home ownership is, like, so last century

The U.S. economy is sinking, chained at the ankles to 10 trillion tons of houses. All that… The U.S. economy is sinking, chained at the ankles to 10 trillion tons of houses. All that wood and brick and metal and chemistry was a magic plastic with which we could have built whatever we wanted: factories, guitars, diplomas, anything.

But we built houses, because the culture and government were hung over from a worn-out ‘Leave It to Beaver’ vision: Everyone had to live in a house, a house that they owned. Because, after all, renting was nothing but feudalism. Unless it was public housing, and then it was communism. Actually, renting is the future, and free choice will make it so.

I forecast the United States’ will become more urban. Partly this is necessity. But facility is even more crucial to the trend.

Craigslist, for example, makes urban life 10 times easier. On Craigslist, you can find rooms, roommates, furniture, jobs, parking, ride shares, events and people with similar interests.

Just think about the case of furniture: When you need to stock an apartment, Craigslist is there with hundreds of free or cheap furniture pieces, closer and even cheaper than IKEA. The furniture might even be a veteran Craigslist piece, recycled two or three times. Craigslist is Mary Poppins’ purse, but without the medicine. It’s a bottomless Dumpster, but without the coffee grounds. It’s a never-ending curbside, where every night is the night before trash day.

Craigslist is a jewel in the crown of civilization.

Plus, we have Google. I can type ‘optometrist 15213’ and have a map of 12 optometrists, with addresses, directions, numbers, hours and even reviews a click away. It’s how I thought the Web would be when it first disappointed me as a child.

Google Transit tells you three ways to anywhere. It collapses the weird Clue Game of bus schedules and subways into a single query. And with GPS and portable Internet becoming common, you can access Google Transit pretty much anywhere — a map, schedule, memory and sense of direction in one, like having the Rain Man as your guardian angel.

And when a renter couples Google Streetview with Craigslist, look out! It’s a real-time housing catalogue. You can type the address from Craigslist into Streetview and check out the house and the neighborhood. Then you can log onto LandorSlum.com and see, with surprising accuracy, which prefix applies to your lord.

The Internet is making the world more like the Internet. And ironically, that’s more like the world as you natively envision it, before you get acquainted with its hang-ups and hassles and delays and awkwardness and unexpected expenses piling up on all sides.

It’s like when you take Econ 101, you learn about ideal, perfectly competitive markets, where consumers have perfect information and there are tons of sellers competing. Your common sense and your economics professor ought to tell you right away those happy graphs are a dream that we use to build on — the ‘do re mi’ of economics. But with these new tools, city life approaches that dream. And it’s renters who get the closest, with their flexibility and better bargaining position.

What’s more, American culture is already suited to rental living. One of the most important things you learn in an U.S. college — the only thing lots of people learn — is how to live with others who are not family. It’s common here to live with people you met only months before, or even with people you met on Craigslist.

In many cultures, these arrangements are impossible and weird. But Americans should stand proud: We are skilled at leaving one another alone. You’ll hear an American in an argument yell, ‘It’s a free country!’ By this, they don’t mean the other person is violating their natural rights, but that in a cultural sense, telling someone else what to do is like going to work naked. That makes it easy for us to live together closely.

And since the housing bubble has burst, so has the collective delusion that a mortgage is the best way to save your money. It’s fine, in that it forces you to save. You’ll be evicted if you don’t. But housing is not as safe or as profitable as a diversified set of stocks and bonds. And as stagnant wages have humbled politicians, it’s clear now that housing is no better socially than investment in education, machines or infrastructure.

In the United States today, there are subdivisions flooded to the gutters in debt, crowded with big, boxy houses. There are big, boxy cars crowding highways en route to crowded parking lots at big, boxy Big Box retailers. And inside are big, boxy Americans who moved so far out of town so they could own their own house, but who still can’t find the space for a healthy walk.

However, on Tuesday, an educated, upper-class family will seek temporary housing in one of the United States’ most dangerous urban areas. And they will call it improvement. Call me an optimist — Americans always are — but I predict a trend.