Downsizing an American Dream

By LANCE MORROW

It is not really what we had in mind. It is not the American house we dreamed of, not even the house we grew up in, the house we remember. Sometimes it stands a little too near the freeway, in a raw mat of sodded lawn--a poignant dry-green whiffle of grass with a single sapling in it that gives no more shade than a swizzle stick. The house has the frank, bleak starkness of the cut-rate. Its interiors are minimalist, and grimly candid about it. No woodwork, no extras, no little frills of gentility any more. No front hall. One bathroom, with the cheapest fixtures, no bathtub.

Closets as shallow as medicine chests. Walls like shirt cardboards, walls that will not hold the nail when we move in and try to hang the family pictures.

All of this--the economy model stripped down to an irreducible ascetic tackiness--can be ours for more dollars than our fathers used to earn, total, in ten or 15 years, for a price that once would have purchased Tara, or at least the six-bedroom Lake Forest spread of a successful cardiologist.

Americans have always cherished an almost ideological longing for a house of their own.

Today, the sweet fantasy of the dream house, the little fortress of home, My Blue Heaven, has jolted up against hard economics.

The prices of land and money have climbed to sometimes inaccessible heights. Mortgage rates (a record high of 18.6% lately) make it more and more difficult to buy a house, or to sell one.

Americans can no longer afford to keep moving to fresh landscape farther and farther from the cities; gasoline is too expensive. So the price of the limited desirable land available rides up on the cost push. In some places--parts of California, for example--the great speculative housing dementia has cooled down recently. But the damage has been done.

If inflation has not exactly devoured the dream, it has taken a painful bite out of it. Good, even splendid houses are still built; America is not suddenly being driven out into hovels and Hoovervilles. But the number of Americans who can afford first-class housing is dwindling. The median price of a new home has gone from $20,000 in 1965 to $70,000 in 1981. The traditional budget formula said that a family should spend no more than one-quarter of gross income on housing. If they obey that rule, less than 10% of Americans can afford a median-priced house.

Some older or more nimble Americans (especially those lucky enough to have bought a house in, say, the Eisenhower or Johnson or Nixon years) have done handsomely in the runaway housing bazaar. They went trading through the '70s market wearing that extortionate little smirk that oil sheiks display on the way out of OPEC meetings.

But a lot of Americans have been left out. Some who tried to start out in the '70s began to suspect that they were operating under some vast cultural misunderstanding. In a way, they were. Owning a house--a home, "the most lyrical of American symbols," Max Lerner once called it--began generations ago as one of the most basic aspirations. It was merely a hope then, not a sure thing. But some time during the long suburban idyll of the postwar years, the idea of owning a house came to harden into a kind of entitlement, a right, an inevitability. The baby-boom children of the broad American middle class--especially seduced by the illusion. Until now, through many headlong cultural confusions, they carried with them a barely conscious expectation, a sort of buried genetic code. When they chose to do so, when the babies started arriving, they could transform themselves into Ozzie and Harriet and find houses like the ones their parents owned--or much nicer, maybe--and therein comfortably get on with the American dream.

Now they scrunch down in a garden-apartment rental somewhere, with the crib in the living room and the wolf frisking in the vestibule, and wonder what went wrong.

Americans feel a little sheepish about complaining, or they should. The cheap-jack bungalow on the wrong side of the beltway is still no Mongolian yurt, no tar-paper shack in one of Rio's mountainside favelas. It is not Soviet housing, with the five-year waiting list for a room of one's own, and couples sometimes stolidly enduring their marriages because there is no other apartment (no other bed, even) to escape to. It is not like the arrangements in dense Hong Kong, as busily transient as an ant colony, or Tokyo, where much middle-class housing looks like the crew's quarters on a submarine.

Are Americans spoiled?

Yes. The barest ticky-tacky American apartment or tract house gives the occupant on whim: hot water, electric lights, air conditioning pretty often, and far more sheltered space than anyone in the world (except for the most imperial and ostentatious) has ever had the luxury of rattling around in. Even the American poor fall victim to a bizarre profligacy. Neolithic villagers periodically burned down their huts to incinerate their vermin; in the South Bronx people burn out their own apartments to obtain the welfare moving allowance, or landlords torch their buildings for the insurance: life among the ruins. Americans who feel sorry for themselves about their housing, middle-class Americans at least, have not explored the alternatives on the down side of civilization. Anyway, ideals of privacy, cleanliness, spaciousness and a certain domestic dignity are fairly new to the history of housing. It is not so many generations ago that we stopped keeping pigs in the house. At Tolstoy's estate, Yasnaya Polyana, the serfs curled up anywhere in the house that they felt drowsy and went to sleep like cats.

But Americans always claim their dispensation. A dream house has been a vision at the core of American hopes, a tender blend of expectation and nostalgia. It derives its imagery from the historical spaciousness of the land (God's country, after all, his bounteous land grant, the interminable individualist homestead unfolding toward the horizon) and the simultaneous need for shelter that its harshness imposed. A people so socially and geographically mobile used housing as an instrument to trumpet their wherewithal, their substance, their civic presence. They have sometimes nearly impoverished themselves to anchor their identities in their homes. In a 1920 magazine serial called "More Stately Mansions," a social-climbing wife pouts and wheedles her husband: "Dickie, I've simply got to have it... A nice house gives a man self-respect and confidence." A house of one's own is refuge, a tangible, physical thing that implies stability in a democracy all liquid and stormily insecure. American history has sometimes been a wild ride: a house traditionally served as the private fortress in which to recover, in which to repel night prowlers and dangerous social change.

The "nation of immigrants" arrived homeless. From the Pilgrims on, they carved their shelter, their human architecture out of wilderness. Lincoln was born in a frontier hovel. Later generations crowded ten to a squalid room in Lower East Side ghettos. Yet Americans operated on a premise of expansion and progress: the private home-- more important, more basic, than the automobile, that bright headlong vehicle of the dream-- was the outward artifact by which Americans defined themselves.

Perhaps some ancient ghost of feudalism, a deep, fundamental fear of dependence and submission, spooked around the edges of the American's pride of ownership: this place is mine. The proto type of Mr. Blandings' dream house was Monticello, that cool Palladian vision built by the American prince of the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson.

In a way the American housing crisis is simply a variation ol the American car crisis: in years past, both were overbuilt Now in housing as in cars, Americans are suffering the discomforts oi what Detroit calls "downsizing." The ultimate result could be both better transportation and better shelter. Maybe.

Housing has always demanded a sacrifice. Certain literal-minded chiefs of Pacific Northwest tribes once killed slaves and captives and erected their new houses upon the bodies, for luck.

Americans may have come by their housing a little too easily in the past two generations. Starting in the Depression, Government agencies like the FHA and later the VA set about turning the U.S. into a nation of home owners. A young family could start off by paying absolutely nothing down and take 30 years to pay off the mortgage. The result was an astonishing national domestication. Today fully two-thirds of Americans own the places where they live. Home owner ship helped to stabilize the U.S.

around a vast and settled middle class; property taxes built the system of public education that gave the U.S. a good deal of its moral ballast.

But the postwar golden age of American housing (all those folks grinning out at the Eisenhower years from their patios, their barbecues) may have overdone the home comforts. It diverted billions that perhaps should have gone into the nation's industrial plant The Reagan Administration (for all its warm rhetorical embrace of hearth and family) wants to readjust the nation's tax and credit policies to favor business investment over mortgage investment.

If inflation eases off, then housing prices may descend iron:

the inconceivable to the merely outrageous. Meantime, Financial Columnist Sylvia Porter has advised: "Downgrade your housing dreams for a while. Share space. Rent. Consider a mobile home.

All three suggestions are being disconsolately accepted. The dividends of necessity, however, could be interesting. After an initial period of bleakness and incompetence while the adjustments get made downsizing and cost cutting may make people think more intelligently about the thing, about the house as an artifact, about what can be done with it. Ultimately, optimistically, the way out of the American housing crisis may not be lower inflation but better design and technology.

Too much American housing, of course, is panoramicaily 11 sipidmass-stamped suburbs as standardized as boxes on super market shelves, the endless Amway and Tupperware America. It may be fatuous to envision new splendors of design in a nation going to condo and cluster. But interesting, occasionally bizarre ideas are turning up. In the Midwest some builders are digging underground houses with skylights and atriums and a thick dome of earth on top that eliminates abrupt temperature changes from season to season. Friends, even strangers, are getting together to buy a house and share it. Under some arrangements, two couples may buy a condominium with two master bedrooms and two master baths and share the kitchen and living room.

Some construction companies now work at what they call retrofitting, building additions to old houses, opening up interiors reclaiming the old stock. In central cities, much gentrmcation is going on: a mixed blessing in which the stylish middle class takes over and polishes up the housing of the poor, leaving the poor to look elsewhere for shelter.

Americans still think of a home of their own as a free-standing one-family house (independence, shelter, family, the Little House on the Prairie still, even when the prairie has turned into Iowa City). One author, Jane Davison, called one-family suburban houses "an oppressive Utopian ideal, a spiritual imperative"the Levittown version of Ibsen's dollhouse. But economics and demographics, as well as feminist restlessness, intrude on the vision The size of the average American household has shrunk in 20 years from 3.3 to 2.75, a fragmentation that demands more housing units even at a moment when housing is harder than ever to finance.

With shelter so expensive to build and, once built, to heat and cool designers are continually trying to redefine what goes into a house No rearrangement of walls and furniture, however, can endow a building with the sort of soul that houses once possessed.

It takes a heap of living, etc.

Americans, a nation of transients, seldom linger long enough in a condo to give it ghosts. There was a time when houses--some houses--sheltered whole generations in sequence, witnessed them and thus acquired a numinous life of their own, a moral dimension that was once much sentimentalized. It was real enough all the same.

Certain American neighborhoods once possessed a similar palpable soul, the neighborhood being the urban apartment dweller's substitute for an ancestral house and grounds. In a sense, it is the soul that Americans yearn after when they think of houses. After an earthquake or tornado, the news always lists the dead, the missing and the "homeless," the last being considered itself a kind ol wound a private desolation. We all drive past the house where 'we grew up and stare at it oddly, with a strange ache, as if to extract some meaning from it that has been irrecoverably lost. In 1902 the genteel architect-writer Joy Wheeler Dowd wrote sweetly: "Every man or woman hopes one day to realize his or her particular dream of home." It did not have to be a Newport "cottage" or the Baths of Diocletian. It was a small internal grandeur that counted, the sense of refuge and privacy, the Marxist s "bourgeois individualism" tricked out with antimacassars and, in the fullness of time, an island in the kitchen. Americans may have overdone some of that a little.

The turtle comes equipped with a standard-issue carapace Is there some naturally ordained allotment for human sheltt In 1920 the Russian "sanitary housing norm" decreed that each citizen was entitled to 100 sq. ft. of living space, an expansive ideal seldom achieved. Americans occupy at least 140 sq ft on average; by most of the world's standards, they live like caliphs The current constriction of their housing may make some Americans claustrophobic, but cross-cultural comparison might also remind them to be grateful for what they have It might encourage them, as well, to shift their perspectives outward a little, to conceive of themselves less as isolated units more as communities. It is not the individual hut that has cultural force and meaning, but the village as a whole, tl sum of our larger arrangements as a tribe. --By Lance Morrow

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