Desperate House Owners

Compulsively scanning house listings, engaging in conversations and Internet research to assess the value of acquaintances’ homes, incessantly remodeling and expanding — these are the symptoms of a “syndrome” afflicting Americans in their relationship with real estate. The unprecedented scale of developments that feature two-bathroom basements and four-car garages isn’t just a supersized elaboration of the American Dream, claims Daniel McGinn, but demands a completely new take on homeownership. He eschews technological and economic explanations in order to examine the psychological and behavioral trends that have led to an “obsession with our homes.”

McGinn cheekily describes victims of “house lust” as “junkies” with a disorder that borders on the pornographic. Homebuyers lust after unattainable McMansions like Nabokovian predators longing for Lolita. Every remodeling job plays out as a masculinity contest, where housewives with effete husbands surrender to their virile contractors. While these accounts make for tasty reading, however, McGinn’s analyses end up sounding awfully policywonky. Many of his data-driven arguments invoke concepts like labor market specialization and job migration — a far cry from the irrational wants and desires that ostensibly drive house lust.

To his credit, McGinn notes several overlooked phenomena of the real estate industry: The “new house smell” desired by those who can’t fathom bathing or sleeping in a home that has been “used”; the social problems associated with “undercrowding”; and the theater of model homes, where realtors hire ex-Baywatch actors to play an identifiable nuclear family before an audience of buyers. But McGinn loses sight of larger issues in the thick of these amusing anecdotes. For instance, he describes “relos” who compensate for the discomfort of job-related moves by buying ever-larger houses designed to accommodate farflung friends and major social events, like wedding receptions and company barbecues. If this practice, called “buying up,” is as widespread as McGinn claims, then daily life is becoming increasingly consigned to the domestic realm. Relos aren’t merely keeping up with the Joneses; they’re turning homes into short-term fortresses, stocked with oversized products and outfitted with bedrooms galore, in order to entertain unlimited guests without having to venture outside.

McGinn cheekily describes victims of ‘house lust’ as ‘junkies’ with a disorder that borders on the pornographic.”

McGinn also fails to ask how the new functions of housing might change our conception of homeownership — a glaring question in the wake of defaulting borrowers who are walking away from their “homes” with the nonchalance of a tenant who flakes out on his lease. The quest for expanding markets not only devalued lending practices and construction methods, but may have weakened the consumer’s bond with his home. Unfortunately, House Lust, which went to press before the housing bubble definitively burst, does not address this issue, focusing instead on luxury accoutrements and telematic voyeurism.

An epilogue acknowledges the poor timing of the book’s release, but maintains that the excesses of house lust will outlast the current crisis. Either way, McGinn’s book is best read as a historical artifact of an era when homeownership is one step removed from psychiatric disorder.