The American Dream Illusion

The American Dream of homeownership is perhaps the grandest illusion of all. It is a game that is not only perpetrated to defeat, it is virtually undefeatable. The odds aren’t just stacked against individuals, they don’t really exist. They are an illusion. You never really own the land. The county you live in owns the land and you are granted the more or less temporary ownership so long as you pay for the privilege. Unlike a mortgage which is a finite loan, lasting only as long as it takes to pay it back along with the interest, however fair or unfair, land taxes and the county’s ownership of the land your property sits on is infinite. It never ends. You will NEVER own that land outright. It’s true that you can do what you want with the land as long as you “own” it by paying the mortgage on the property and/or the taxes… or can you? Well, in some, in fact most, of the incorporated areas of the county that’s not true either. You can only do the things you want as long as they meet the ordinances put forth by the county zoning board, and you pay the fees to do it. Is Home “Ownership” Good? Of course it makes more sense to buy a piece of property, even with its extreme costs and limitations, than it does to rent. After all, people who buy income property aren’t doing it, as a general rule, to be altruistic. They aren’t going to let people live there free, or even at “cost.” When someone buys income property it is to rent it out at a price that will both pay the expenses (mortgage, utilities and taxes) and also afford some amount of profit, even if that profit is slim, you’re paying far more than you would by buying the comparable property for yourself, and eventually, if you are smart, you’ll pay off that high interest mortgage and pay far less on taxes and utilities than you would if you were just renting. The trick is to be reasonable. We are so far out of the reach of reasonable as a whole in society. For years I have driven by new developments asking myself why it is you only see huge, extraordinarily expensive homes being built anymore. Rarely do you fine communities of homes at reasonable footages and acreages anymore. Everyone wants the BIG dream. No longer are we happy enough just to buy the dream of home ownership, it has to be as big and as expensive as we can afford, and then some. I love to watch the multitude of various home repair/sale/flipping shows on television. Often the same questions pop up in my mind when watching them as what used to come to mind looking at developments. Why do these shows always seem to showcase homes worth hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of dollars as if they were the norm? Obviously from all of those developments building mini mansions, they aren’t far from the norm unfortunately. But why? Do we really need a six hundred thousand, three thousand square foot home with four bathrooms? It’s pretty unlikely. In fact, most families of four or five could live quite nicely in a hundred and fifty thousand dollar, one thousand square foot home, but that certainly isn’t going to impress anyone. Another reason for the mass desire for glamorous extravagance is those exact shows. Those and all of the lifestyle of the rich and famous type shows feed our desire to have, at least the appearance of, being in the upper echelon of society. The people that finance those shows aren’t foolish. They know we have some innate desire to see how the “other half” lives, and an even greater desire to have that as well once we see it. Seeing it over and over only drives home the desirability of such extravagance. Unfortunately, the average person can’t really afford it, or if they somehow can manage to eek out the money to pay the bills on such grand palaces, they will never own it outright in order to at least get out from under the mortgage if not the proportionately higher property taxes. Exactly what that upper 1% wants. They don’t really want you to get out of the mortgage, or the need to add to a mortgage with a 2nd, or 3rd in order to pay for more things you don’t really need. IF you did you would no longer own them interest, and the governments that support that 1% don’t want you to either, because then you might start to see the truth of what part they play in your subjugation to costs.