Housing Fetish

January29, 2007
     Martha Stewart was not an accident of history. She came along in the late 20th century as a kind of spirit guide to a society whose bad choices and misinvestments had led to the wholesale destruction of any place in America that people called home. And by this I mean the towns, neighborhoods, and city districts of our land, not just the individual dwellings.

     By the 1980s, America had been converted, with monstrous efficiency, into what I have called a geography of nowhere, a panorama of identical highway strips, malls, big box warehouses, fried food out-parcels, and free parking wastelands -- all serving the endless new subdivision pods of single family houses. The ultimate result was a landscape full of places no longer worth caring about.

     The program was carried out ruthlessly by big corporations and their hand-maidens, the road-builders, the house-builders, and the brotherhood of traffic engineers, but it was fully supported by the public at large and their elected local officials on the planning and zoning boards. It was both an "emergent" economic ecology -- a systemic response to decades of cheap oil and favorable geopolitics -- and a consciously mapped-out attempt to create a kind of Utopia, in this case a suburban Utopia of Happy Motoring. Whatever it was, nothing like it had ever been seen before.

     It had many consequences but one of the worst was the impoverishment of public space. From the social point-of-view, it turned out that housing pods and highway strips lined with strip malls were a poor substitute for main street towns or walkable neighborhoods. Under the insane dictates of single-use zoning, each individual was trapped in a car for hours each day, often in vexing traffic with other isolated individuals, and also often in the company of little children with a low tolerance to being trapped and vexed. Older children lacking drivers' licenses lost access to other social realms beyond the subdivision of houses. The adventurous ones assembled in the bosky berms between the WalMarts and the KMarts to smoke a variety of drugs, worship Satan, and torture kitty cats. The rest were relegated to the room at home with the one-eyed-monster, the television.

      The case was not much better for the adults. By the 1980s, both parents had to be out of the house generating income to pay the mortgage and especially to pay for the multiple cars needed to service the family headquarters. Mom went to work not because Betty Friedan said that actuarial science was more fun than managing a house, but because wages were stagnant and Dad could no longer make the family's ends meet.

     Out of this sad and desperate circumstance, Martha Stewart arose. The promise of Stewartism was that if the public realm was now inaccessible or meaningless, then one should make the most of the private realm. This was accepted as self-evident by enough people to make Martha extremely wealthy. Luckily for Martha, her job was at home. She didn't have to drive thirty-eight miles to a cubicle in the billing office of Ramjack Medical and spend eight hours each day minutely examining spreadsheets on a computer monitor.

      As her wealth and success increased, Martha's resources for doing things in and around the house enabled her to spin a fantasy of uber-homemaking that America found irresistible -- despite the fact that everyone else spent so much time away from the house that it was nearly impossible for them to emulate the goddess of hearth and home. Instead, they devoured her many publications and TV shows, finding consolation in all the beautifully portrayed scenes of Martha enacting the fantasy for them.

      History is full of ironies and paradoxes, and one of them is that this avatar of home-making was relentlessly hunted down by federal prosecutors for allegedly scamming $40,000 on an insider stock sale, while true major league corporate CEO grifters walked off legally into their golden sunsets with hundreds of millions in back-dated stock options and other booty winkled out of feckless boards of directors.

     It is also an ironic coincidence that at the exact time Martha Stewart went off to jail, the American home fantasy went totally off the rails. The systematic shut-down of America's manufacturing sector led policy-makers to insidiously try to replace it with a hyped-up housing industry. They kicked off the program by dropping the prime interest rate as close to zero as possible, making money extremely cheap to borrow. Everybody need a home, the logic went, including those who ordinarily wouldn't have qualified for regular mortgages that required substantial down payments, proof of employment, and other formalities. So the answer was to engineer a financing modality that would allow anyone to buy a house -- and thereby ramp up the "homebuilding" industry into super-hyper-turbo-overdrive, which would incidentally generate even more potential house-buyers among the many framers, trimmers, plumbers, electricians, painters, real estate agents, and sellers of Corian countertops, who made good wages or commissions on delivering the "product." Meanwhile, the new housing pods in evermore remote locations, where there were no towns, could be accessorized with all the requisite service infrastructure -- new highways, strip malls, Pizza Huts, WalMarts, Best Buys, and video rental joints, all of which had to be built by somebody, making for additional contracts, incomes, and potential house-buyers.

     Meanwhile the financial wizards "innovated" methods for dispersing the risk associated with iffy loans (made to people with poor prospects for repayment) by bundling the mortgages into odd-lots and repackaging them as tradable securities, which could be used to "leverage" other finance "plays" yet more exotically abstracted from the actual making-and-selling real things of value. At the same time, the wizards converted the mortgage insurance business into a casino of swappable risk, materializing more fees and profits for themselves out of thin air.

     This extremely complex racket worked well for a brief period of time, namely the period when the price of houses steadily increased, year after year, promoting the expectation that rising house "equity" was a permanent condition of life, and that the dependable annual increase in value could be "put to work" in the form of borrowing more money against it. The supposed increase in value protected those trafficking in swappable risk, since increased value banished the risk of loss, and the notion of moral hazard disappeared into the dumpster of history.

     The whole racket floundered when several things changed or went awry. One was the sheer saturation of markets. Sooner or later, everybody who might possibly buy a house, got a house. The racket had had the perverse effect of stealing demand from the future by making house-buyers of those who were not really ready to buy -- e.g. very young adults with no savings or people with bad credit records. And not every immigrant from Bangladesh, El Salvador, or the Central African Republic could be positioned as a house buyer -- even under the now nearly nonexistent lending standards.

      The next thing that went wrong was affordability. If absolutely everybody's house rose ten percent in value every year for years and years -- including every "pre-owned" raised ranch shitbox -- then sooner or later every house in America would cost at least half a million dollars. And with wages stagnant among the 90 percent who worked outside the financial services industry, sooner or later no house would be affordable to that 90 percent majority under even the most supernaturally lax lending provisions.

     The final problem would come when central bankers had to raise interest rates so that customers for debt would accept the risk of investing in a national economy that was increasingly seen to be based on the engineering of modalities to get something for nothing.

     This is the point we're at now. The whole system was greatly underwritten by the final peaking of available energy, chiefly oil, which made it possible in the first place to sell so much real estate in the farthest-flung outlands of the American landscape, including not only desert and swamp, but also prime farmland. The housing bubble began to collapse at exactly the moment that the world reached its all-time oil production peak: the summer of 2005.

    Now the house market is both saturated and wildly mis-valued. Most of the new houses were built in places that will be logistically unfavorable as motoring becomes less affordable. Many of them are too large to heat as home heating becomes less affordable. The houses are overpriced. Those who must sell must drop their prices. Many such sellers will have to sell for less than the obligations still owed on their houses. The speculators have necessarily fallen by the wayside, because speculation is not possible in a falling market. Those who expected to sell old houses in older places for a half a million dollars or more to buy new houses in new places will have to stay put. As prices fall, the few potential buyers still left will step back in anticipation of further price drops. This "death spiral" will be self-reinforcing and take years to play out. As it occurs, many of the creatively-engineered contracts will be welshed on. Lenders will choke on "non-performing" mortgages. Mortgage-backed securities will lose their credibility and turn into junk or worse (worse-than-junk being certificates with no value whatsoever, not even pennies on the dollar). Bets, plays, leverages, positions, and hedges based on the idea that all these loans would continue performing will be wiped out.

     The final result will be a dashed American Dream -- of a safe life in a happy home. Poor Martha Stewart will be seen as the goddess who failed. Well, she already has, really, having gone to prison and afterward retreated into her omnimedia fortress of corporate refuge (basically joining the enemy). As the middle class chokes and gets crushed under the weight of its unpayable debts and falling standards of living, Martha may be lucky to avoid getting eaten, along with a long list of other celebrity porkchops that an angry and grievance-filled public will turn on.

     Finally, the idea that people could live happily ever after in "homes" devoid of any larger community context, or reality-based economic context, will fail. Perhaps we will even stop calling houses "homes" -- as we have been conditioned to do by the realtors hoping to manipulate all our subconscious desires for safety, familiarity, and order in this world of chaos and sorrow.

Comments

[kd]

Brilliant piece, Jim. One of your best. Many thanks.

[Jerry Johnson]

Really neato piece Jim. A lot of fun this week. I cannot wait to go after those real estate shows on HG TV.

[Stephen Beltramini]

Martha, like so much of what America loves, is all about looking good. While she tries to create an image of a home that has has occupant comfort improvement as its main function, the reality is that Americans aspire to live in a home that is anything but functional. The house has to look good. It doesn't matter whether it can heat itself, soaking up enough sun to allow its occupants to be comfortable affordably. It doesn't matter whether the yard has space to grow some food, or provide a true place for the kids to play. Rather, it needs to be a showcase, primarily suited to show off to the neighbors and be useful for the once or twice a year dinner parties. The yard is full of high maint. ornamentals that the kids can't touch. The house windows face the wrong way, etc. Homes used to assist their owners in living, providing comfort or even aiding in sustinance creation. Now the beast lives merely to be fed as a trophy for entertainment.

Martha may grow some tomatoes or even a patch of grain outside, pretending to make a house more useful, but she and her ilk are really all about homes as entertainment rather than homes for living and survival.

This will change and those with the foresight to lead the change will not regret it.

[Jax]

Well written.

Will the people waiting for home prices to drop be suckered into a false housing rally when the tv boxes tell them in chorus the housing market bottomed. I can already hear "there has never been a better time to buy"

[Reid]

There are so many strange metaphors in our society today of lifestyle choices perceived as immutable and normal.

It's tragically comedic, as Jim points out, that Martha's downfall coincided with the start of the house market toppling. All those 'flip this house' DIY shows are next on the chopping block in an era of declining housing values.

I hear that Paris Hilton and Jenna Jameson are going to be involved in a reality TV show in the not-too-distant future helping young virgin men bag their first conquest.

Oh Lord, could this finally be the sign that the reign of soul-sucking, mind-numbing must-see-reality-TV is finally coming to an end as well?

The Long Emergency will have some good outcomes. At least I won't have to hear about Paris Hilton anymore....unless she starts up her own religion. Perish the thought!

[one Eye Open]

"Instead, they devoured her many publications and TV shows, finding consolation in all the beautifully portrayed scenes of Martha enacting the fantasy for them."

Who is this "they" to whom so many on this forum are always referring? I don't give a rat's rump what Martha Stewart thinks about anything, much less how I should set up and equip my domicile. Furthermore, I don't know anyone else who does. So lets take a poll right here...Everyone who worships her Martha-ness please raise their hand? Just as I suspected not a shingle hand raised. Of course we are the enlightened. It is only the few here who have managed to avoid "the big sell." Its those other foolish "little people" who have all been slavishly sucked in to the consumerist vortex.

What a bunch of pompous clap-trap. The thinking here is no different than that of all the shakers and movers in our esteemed government who know best how to collect our hard earned money through ursurious tax schemes just to pour it all down a never ending rat hole. At least those who pony up to the cash register to purchase some Martha sheets, at the end of the day, can wrap themselves in some Martha sheets. Which, by the way, are much softer and warmer than the gossamer, "vapor" sheets that Uncle Sam provides us from our overly taxed dollar.

[ryan costa]

Nostalgia is always marketable.

I joined the messageboard at www.dwightshcultz.com. Dwight Schultz was famous for playing H.M. Murdock on the A-Team. I was a big fan of his.

Today he hosts a 'conservative' radio podcast. Fans of this show seem to be caught up in the absurdity of American suburbia big box retail entitlement. They've gathered into herds. Any perceived threat to the entitlements is stampeded upon. Apparently we now define our entitlements as our Freedoms.

So, all I did was post a link to www.kunstler.com on a forum thread about energy. I didn't argue or contradict anyone or challenge anyone or question their assumptions. And they banned me from the forum! They deleted my account! Reality is anathema to the new American Freedom.

[nichol dance]

You know, there really is a lot of this virtual experience stuff going on. Whether the source is the web, magazines, or TV, there seems to be a heckuva lot of:

. Classic car magazines filled with things you can't afford.
. Fixit TV shows and magazines filled with projects you won't do.
. Travel and beautiful house magazines filled with exeriences you'll never have.
. Worthless investing magazines (Forbes, etc.) filled with articles on the lifestyles of the rich.
. Prerecorded music and pro sports to enable us to watch others play.

There's nothing really new here, just an increasing amount of virtual living.

It's all a kind of lifestyle porn. We'll all just lie back in our nutrient baths and play World of Warcraft.

[xamax]

its ironic that martha tries to portray a perfect home, whilst living alone as a divorced woman. of course of the people who watch and follow her - how many of them have dysfunctional homes? at least the sheets all match.

[betamax]

"Ramjack Medical"

Good post Jim, and I loved the Vonnegut reference.

[theEye]

"Fetish" and "porn" are such apt terms. We're seeing the pornification of everything...houses, cars, phones, TVs, refrigerators, you name it.

As a 37-year-old male who grew up in a drafty Ohio farmhouse heated by a coal and wood furnace, it's amazing to me how many people actually believe they cannot survive another minute without granite countertops in their kitchens. I mean, how did humanity make it this far without

Just the other day my boss was whining about the indiginity he suffers having to drive a 1999 Jeep Cherokee. When my 1988 Mazda hatchback needed a jump-start a few weeks back, he helped me out but spent the whole time lecturing me how I could buy a new car for "only" $200/month in payments. Somehow, that was a better idea than just buying a new battery for $80.

Both of my bosses are currently remodeling their homes into IKEA show-places: new carpets, the aforementioned countertops, kitchen appliances (stainless steel, natch). Both have also recently bought new cars (the Jeep just got to be too embarassing, apparently). All of this against their home "equity".

I may sound jealous, but I'm not. I'm currently renting a house with 70s-era applicances and faux-marble formica countertops. It's nothing fancy, but I'm happy, and it's much more of a home than either of theirs. I wouldn't trade with them for anything.

[kd]

"lifestyle porn" -- nicely put, Nichol. I think of the folks who spend (literally) hours at the Barnes & Noble or Borders cafes reading magazines such as Town & Country, Cigar Afficianado, The Robb Report, Luxury Homes & Estates...

[dennisjb]

good rant!

obviously the "American Way of Life" is still non-negotiable and continues apace.

future anthropologists will marvel at the decadent lifestyle that was a "given"....

[Wells]

Sprawling, single-use suburban subdivision housing creates a culture of mock isolationism, sure. This should be drummed into America's collective consciousness relentlessly. But, what has Jim ever written about solutions? His alarmism lacks any sort of direction toward how our built environment may evolve into something more functional and less culturally obscene.

I think I'll go back to playing my favorite PC game, "Children of the Nile". City building at the agrarian+ level offers lessons in economics that may be applicable today. Oh damn! My priests are failing to educate themselves again and the people are blaming 'me' the Pharoah. I will crush them!

[German Mike]

The hottest housing market
Recently I had the bad fortune to be forced to move from North Carolina to Miami. Like ancient man followed the herds modern man follows the job(s). I rent an old 1300 sqft house with 2br and 2 ba for $1400.- per month. Incidentally the place is for sale for a measly $400K. Property tax and insurance run about $6000.- each anually…welcome to Miami. That makes for a total of $1000/month just to keep current on those obligations. Suppose I would buy the place with no $$ down. At 6% on the $400K I am looking at about another $2000/month in interest alone. So that’s a grand total of $3000/month I would have to pay to the insurance, the county and the bank, not including any principal payment yet. So why exactly would I want to buy a place that would cost me $3000/month when I can rent it for $1400/month?
In short, investors are priced out of the market. People who have enough sense to run some numbers (like myself) are priced out of the market as are people who simply think it’s ridiculous to pay $400K for a small 1930’s house in a marginal neighborHOOD.
So who is left buying this shit? Certainly nobody in their right mind. In some areas the market might have reached bottom. In Miami it certainly still has long ways to go. The place I live in was bought by its current owner in 6/2002 for $149K; I would guess that’s a good guestimate where things will eventually end up.

[Broken Teeth]

I always find it strange that so many decorate the suburban/ex-urban homes with large landscapes/scenes of European towns and street life.

Its though they believe living in vibrant, compact (sub)urban area is merely a fantasy.

Why won't people wake up and realize that they could live that life in America too? Almost every town used to have a vibrant "downtown".

It wasn't even that long ago. I remember in the early 80's my mother did almost all her shopping in the core of our mid-sized town, now it does not even have a decent small grocery store.

I guess for most people, instead of living it, they induge by visiting theme parks such as Europe (with a 10-day, 7 country tour) or one of the remaining local downtowns which have adjusted by opening trinket shops, art galleries and high-end, er, expensive restaurants.

[elad]

I always liked Martha Stewart and always found it odd that people project so much on to her as some of these comments do. The glee stupid people had when she was unjustly carted off to jail was fucked up. I find JHK's use of her as a symbol strained in his otherwise excellent blog. Martha is about finer living of a more genuine domicile that points back to the values espoused by JHK. She is all about making, growing and creating food, etc., yourself or seeking out small town craftspeople who do. Her popularity is a revolt against the prefab manufactured alienation of consumerist suburbia.

[xamax]

a revolt against the prefab manufactured alienation of consumerist suburbia ?

thats a hoot.

Martha is all about selling a bunch of fake "old fashioned" looking home goods, via a huge corporate multi-channel pipeline.

she is more about maximizing her profit then anything else.

if you spend the time to watch her and read her stuff, then I pity you.

[Jack]

Best. Kunstler. Ever!

[Bor]

James,

You can write!
Love it!

[bestwishes]

elad,

i watched martha laying out thanksgiving dinner on her show one time. she lovingly showed us the monogrammed napkins which she had found at a garage sale or a thrift store. then she nudge/winked and said she just tells the guests they were grandma's.

i imagine her planting daisies and humming a tune while blood drips out of her ears. she's famous for getting her friends to do stuff they can't afford with her, saying "oh c'mon. i'll pay". and then forgetting to. her family
divorced her. they couldn't take it anymore.
no sympathy here for martha. what really galls me is that my mom respects her. my mom is so real it breaks my heart. she (mom) has no idea what a megalomaniac she (martha)is.

[jonny quest]

@theEye

I think you'll enjoy this:

http://www.violentacres.com/archives/35/mcmansions-are-for-mcidiots

[xfarmer]

A guy I work with just had his first child in December. He and his wife have decided to sell their Chevy Silverado (95K miles, runs well) and purchase a brand spankin' new one. They feel that with her returning to work and their dear sprout going to the sitter, they'd better have a safe, reliable vehicle. I bet that beast gets 18 MPG highway. Not only is it pathetic that they feel they need something better already(how superfluous), but it's more pathetic that they can't buy something with better gas mileage. What a bunch of morons.

He says he also must return to work ASAP. She makes double the salary he does(60K),in a rural community, nonetheless. So I ask him why he just doesn't stay home with the baby. He says they can't afford it and he likes his job.

On another note, I was reading the editorial in the Pipeline and Gas Journal last week. The editor, Jeff Share, said he just read an interview in the January Playboy magazine featuring T. Boone Pickens, an oil/natural gas tycoon.

Pickens said in the interview that we have probably used up half the oil in the world and that it will be pretty much gone by 2100. He figures oil could hit $80 a barrel by year's end and that if Saudi, Nigerian or Iranian oil goes off the market, we will see $100 oil.

Is it any wonder why this guy has thrown all he's got into natural gas these days?

[bud4wiser]

JK, good work. I think your article offers an appropriate -"hook"- for an examination of the success of modern media to corrupt, or at least pervert much of the meaning {and values?} surrounding the concepts of home and community.

Homes too beautiful to live in? Yards too good for anything but looking at? My experience suggests the one measure of American success is how much of your home is for show; and how much space do you have out of casual view for "living."

Similarly, the new community-space standard is to have a spacious, yet sterile, "commons grounds" to buffer any possible connection or contact with your neighbors.

Terms like "comfortable" or "functional" have taken on negative connotations. Let's face it - we owe to ourselves, to spend more than we make and buy more than we need. Surviving, will be considered "losing" for some time to come.

[mc]

Martha projected an image of "class" and fine living. She became a celebrity. This country is brimming over with folks who worship "celebrities" - fantasy living as opposed to staying fixed in drab, uninteresting lives. So, they try to emulate her style. Lacking insight, they feel better for doing so. There are many people with less-than-stellar ability to analyze and comprehend their influences. The same phenomenon occurred during the OJ trial - There were several acquaintances(whites-females) who just knew he was simply being persecuted - Why? Because identifying with celebrities is their gig. Living by proxy abounds in this country.