‘Home-Ownership Society’ Not Necessarily Best for Community

Homeownership has no "mystical virtue" that makes the owner more valuable to society, writes Mark Winston Griffith

Community development expert Griffith explains that the obsession with home ownership as the key to rebuilding communities is short-sighted. The emphasis on creating more consumer opportunities for individuals may actually undermine efforts to build healthy neighborhoods.

Mark Winston Griffith is a fellow at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy .

"Ownership Society." Thanks to President Bush, those two words roll off the tongue as if they were one. Yet there are times when notions of ownership conspire against notions of society—especially as they play out in the everyday lives of people living in the communities of America. What America really needs is a policy vision which sparks community building and cooperation among its citizens rather than instructing them to simply spend their way into the American Dream.

The Ownership Society is meant to be the 21st century response to The New Deal and the Great Society—programs where the government had a clear role in improving the lives of Americans. These programs had shortcomings, for sure, but they invoked collective work and responsibility. They called on Americans to consider the welfare of the community—to view their personal fate as linked inextricably to their neighbor’s fate.

Mark Winston Griffith

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