Malcolm Gladwell on Home Ownership and Community
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 12. 2.08
A propos of our post on Is Home Ownership a Good Thing? Part II, the introduction of Malcolm Gladwell's new book Outliers describes a study of Roseto, a small town in Pennsylvania, where for some unknown reason people just didn't die of the usual causes in America at the time, primarily heart attacks- they essentially kept going until they died of old age. The two doctors doing the study finally figured it out:
As Bruhn and Wolf walked around the town, they figured out why. They looked at how the Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the street, say, or cooking for one another in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town's social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to mass and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under two thousand people. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the community, which discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.In transplanting the paesani culture of southern Italy to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania, the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world.
In this case, staying put and laying down roots made a real difference.
More on this story in TreeHugger:
Is Home Ownership a Good Thing? Part II
Is Home Ownership a Good Thing?
Paul Krugman on Home Ownership
5 Alternatives to the Buy vs Rent Question
Thirsty for more? Check out these related articles:
- Is Home Ownership a Good Thing? Part II
- So Long 2008, and Thanks for All the Posts
- The TH Interview: Janine Benyus—Biomimicry in Design (Part One)
- Acorn/ Deck/ Empyrean Born 1947 Died 2008
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I'm all for home ownership. A sense of belonging to a community is necessary for a happy life. But what sickens me is the excess. I guess it began with the advent of air conditioning, and people suddenly stopped needing to sit outside and chat with neighbors. They spent all day in their homes. This caused them to want bigger homes. No every street in Dallas has at least one Stuper-Sized McMansion. What is really funny to me is that their are actually HISTORICAL ZONING LAWS in Dallas to protect people against parasitic builders. Think about that. Historical Zoning for a city that's not 100 years old. And most of them are in areas that are less than 80 years old, and have no real significance to the city.
This post seems to counter the "Is Home Ownership a Good Thing? Part II" post. Although, to me, this description sounds like a common sense scenario that our modern day world has forgotten.
Further, while not impossible, I believe it is unlikely or uncommon to find that kind of community within a large city setting. So, an idylic, healthy town, as described in the post, would seem incompatible with the high density housing that so many treehuggers consider desirable.
I agree with Dallas. It's hard to be comfortable when your own home belongs to someone else.
If you're looking for more information about Outliers, check out my notes from Malcom's December 1st conversation at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto.
This just goes to show us that simple home ownership is not wrong per se... I think it just demonstrates that wherever you live, you need to care about the people you live near. If homeowners have roots it's because they work at it; they have to talk to people around them to form those relationships. I've known plenty of homeowners who would rather police their neighbors through controlling associations than form any meaningful relationships, same as I've known people who live in a rental for many years and form deep roots in the communities they live in.