What Is Home? A Defense of the Semi-Nomadic Life

One of the persistent changes in society that I see most affecting me and my peers is the concept of home.

Back when my parents and grandparents were my age, people tended to stay pretty close to where they grew up. It took a century for my father's Irish-Catholic family to begin drifting out of the Chicago region. Even working class people were expected to put together a down payment in their early 20s to buy a 30-year home loan. Then it was typical to live in that home for the full 30-year life of the loan, paying it off in installments.

Today, almost nobody does this. The U.S. is a much more mobile society, and jobs that pay above the survival threshold have become more difficult to come by. We have booms and busts, and these are often very local. It is very common to move to another state – or perhaps even another country – chasing after a job opportunity. The average homeowner stays in their home for only eight years on average now, which means that a significant number of homes are owned for only around five years before the owner sells to someone else and moves to another place.

Homes are now packaged up like stocks, to be bid and speculated on. Prices rise and fall like the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones. News anchors report in a frenzied tone on "the latest news from the housing market." Prices have risen to outrageous bubble heights that bring to mind the 2006-07 era, dimly remembered now in the shadow of the correction that followed.

For a century or longer, housing was viewed as a stable commodity. Robert Shiller calculates that home values rise at the inflation rate, when correcting for size and amenities of the asset. Today's investors disagree. They see housing growing much faster than inflation, and have invested billions of dollars accordingly. Homes are now part of a growth-oriented investment portfolio.

Amid all this, it can be easy to forget that a home is a place for people to live. The civic value of housing is that is provides for a stable community that can be counted on to clean up trash, report crimes, fund public utilities, and so on. The common belief is that renters don't care for the condition or appearance of the neighborhood because they have nothing to gain by doing so.

Home owners are also much easier to tax. Funding of public services such as schools, police and fire stations, and local government offices, is typically accomplished by way of property taxes. Since home owners have more invested in the community (or so we are told), it is easier to fund these services by raising property taxes. Other forms of taxation, such as sales taxes, are harder to collect, and tend to be unpopular, and can impact local businesses.

Today in many cities, the home ownership rate is dropping as investors have moved in, purchased up property at a zero interest rate, and are either squatting on the property to sell at a higher price, or renting the property out to a would-be home owner who now must be content to be a renter.

Much has been said about a "housing crisis" and I won't rehash that here. Crisis or not, though, the way we live has been changed severely by these trends.

Take, for example, the Austin metro area. Austin has a mix of older established homeowners who have been here for decades, and newer residents who moved in within the last ten years. The majority of the older established homeowners could not afford to live here if they had to rent or buy a home now at the current rates. They have state government jobs or work in career fields that would not pay nearly enough to qualify for a mortgage at the current prices and rates.

The newer residents are younger, work in higher paying fields like technology and finance, and are unlikely to have been born and raised in the area. They are culturally at odds with the established residents. Newer residents aren't as rooted in the area. They likely moved to the area for a job opportunity or they brought a remote job with them from another area. These are not bulletproof government or union jobs. They are boom-bust cycle jobs.

As the boom cycle has turned to bust, we have seen the population growth in the Austin area rather suddenly die off. Those who moved to the city during this most awful of decades – the 2020s, which is thus far, a decade of plague and madness – are all moving away. This is predictable. Those with boom-bust cycle jobs have to move with the job market.

For millennia, humans lived in nomadic tribes. Their survival depended on following the herds of animals that they hunted. Today's boom-bust white-collar workers are only reliving the ancient past. We are reinventing the nomadic conditions of our forebears but in the language of neoliberal global capitalism.

A mere century ago, most Americans lived in stable communities and felt invested in those communities. Their work was performed in a dedicated workplace – not through an app on a computer device carried in their pocket at all times that makes them accountable to the company even on nights and weekends. Americans are having fewer children, marrying at lower rates, and appear to have given up on the idea of stable communities entirely. Surveys indicate the people now in the age when family-formation occurs are instead indulging in "doom spending" on luxurious vacations and clothing items.

The economic system is eroding the moral fiber of the Judeo-Christian civilization that Americans inherited in the 19th and early 20th centuries. We can see a de-evolution of human life away from the universalist ambitions of the civilization the invented public education and merit-based achievements. Civilization gave people a role and a place, so that they could focus on their work and devote the remainder of their free time to community, family, and personal growth.

Instead, the natives of the 21st century are insecure, fearful, prone to emotional outbursts, and out of touch with family and friends. We are perhaps the most distrustful society in history. We are dislocated in both time and place. We are hostile to the past, even the recent past – any suggestions of nostalgia for the past is quickly silenced, for we want nothing to do with those irrelevant people with their outmoded beliefs. Our cities and towns are becoming nothing more than a collection of temporary rental spaces. Our workplaces embrace "multi-tasking" in a "fast-paced environment" which brings to mind a frightened animal living in a hostile environment and trying to survive. To be "successful" in today's environment means being prepared to uproot oneself to chase after the latest speculative scam – social media, cryptocurrencies, artificial-intelligence, etc. – following the "herd." Consciousness is now rooted at the autonomic level of rodents.

The wonders of the dying civilization that we inherited depend on stability of time and place. We cannot have art, literature, spiritual practice, or community without this. We cannot have a sense of belonging when we must move every two years to avoid rental prices rising, or the latest round of layoffs and closures.

Or can we? It seems that we 21st century natives are finding a way. We are slowly adapting to the situation that has been handed down to us. We are finding that life in the 21st century is very much like life as a pioneer. It is an adventure into an unknown and hostile environment. What little things of culture we have, we cherish and cultivate. We enjoy friendship where we find it. We are practical by necessity.

We are adapting to a life that we now expect to involve a lot more moving, adapting, and coping with incredible change, compared to past generations. This has a potential to create greatness, and to bring about a moral resurgence in a decaying society. Throughout history, it has been common for a great civilization to be formed from a nomadic culture. Harsh environments hone and strengthen the spirit. We may find that the skills learned by those of us struggling to survive the Dark Decade of the 2020s, may someday form the bedrock of a renewed America, one whose promises are no so illusory.