The New Paradigm

What happens when people decide they no longer want to buy houses? Seriously? What happens when decent earners get comfy in their two-bedroom, no frills walk-ups, preferring instead to spend money on long vacations, mango chicken, and slip rentals? When water cooler talk reverts to: riding mowers, elections, and Academy awards.

Los Angeles and San Francisco will soon be like New York City, where it isn't necessarily the case that people of middle-class loin strive to own. Where people live the whole of their lives, adolescence to seniority, without property ownership, without expectation and without stigma.

We're past the point of commiseration-less candor: 'Oh I'm sorry Mr. Entitlement can't scoop up a boy's pad in the Marina'. This isn't just about narrow comfort zones anymore (how I wish it were--this is more than a surrender to rhetoric). There ain't much of an entry level market left, and a lot of borderline buyers are beginning to back away.

What happens when the whole notion of ownership becomes removed and inaccessible, like pony polo or the fox hunt, obscure pastimes of the wealthy elite.

But this is America. What am I worried about? There's plenty of room for development in pleasing sun-belt destinations like Midland and Odessa, Las Cruces and Laughlin. They'll always be cheap four bedroom houses somewhere, and so long as there are, we'll never have to look at our model, at the ungainly pressures and policies of growth and decentralization. Shoot, who wants to bother with this analysis when there's shopping to be done at the cross-town mall.