Brick-and-mortar conservatism?

[imomus]

Is there a link between owning a house and conservatism? Intuitively I'd say yes, there is, and that conversely there's a link between renting and radicalism. Take a look, for instance, at this ranking of the percentage of people renting in various cities:

Berlin 87
Geneva 85
Amsterdam 83
Hamburg 78
Vienna 76
New York 70
San Francisco 65
Chicago 60
Brussels 57
Copenhagen 50
Stockholm 49
Helsinki 47
London 41
Oslo 30
Barcelona 30
Dublin 28
Athens 27

Aren't the cities at the top of that list some of the most radical? Surely it's no accident that people in cities like Berlin, Amsterdam, New York and San Francisco prefer to rent than buy? Surely it changes the whole tenor and texture of civic life in those cities?

But when Evan Davis asked contributors to his interesting investigation into the politics of home ownership, The Price of Property (BBC Radio 4) the same question, he got resounding "no"s all round.

Geo-demographic expert (and iMomus ultra-villain this week) Richard Webber -- author of the Mosaic consumer segmentation tool -- said that there couldn't be a connection between home ownership and conservatism because South Wales contains constituencies where Conservative MPs regularly lose their deposits, and yet South Wales has a high proportion of home ownership. Meanwhile, Labour MP Roy Hattersley and Conservative MP Michael Gove were busy agreeing that because three quarters of British people own their own home, and 90% aspire to, it's impossible to align home ownership with one party or the other. This, it seems to me, is akin to saying that if enough British people -- and all British political parties -- loved Hitler, loving Hitler wouldn't make you a fascist. Surely it's possible that property ownership has shifted the whole of Britain to the right, so that no political party now would dare propose a policy actively encouraging people to rent, or suggesting that renting is a virtue?

House prices -- which for the time being continue to rise feverishly -- drive the UK economy as well as every dinner table conversation. Home ownership is official policy in the UK; the government wants 80% of Britons to own their own homes. Currently, 70% do, the same percentage as in the US. The European average is 60%, though in cities like Berlin that can drop to a mere 13%.

British people borrow more money than anyone in the world to buy their homes. Ownership satisfies a deep need, we're told, in the British psyche: every Englishman's home is his castle. Owning allows you to decorate your place the way you want it, to express yourself, even if in practice that just means that your substandard, identikit, vastly overpriced house has a front door painted in a colour you picked yourself, and that instead of holding your habitat somewhat at arm's length, you hug its horrible chintzy bay windows, dingy garden and meanly-proportioned staircase close to your heart, regarding them as your very own special things.

The politician most responsible for Britain's recent surge in home ownership is Margaret Thatcher, who's quoted on the programme saying that Britain would only be united when everyone in the land owned property. Part of her mission to eradicate socialism saw her selling off public housing, now desperately scarce in the UK.

In fact, owning property has long been at the heart of the British political system. The Great Reform Act of 1832 linked it directly to the right to vote. You could only vote if you owned property worth 40 shillings a year in the counties or 10 pounds a year in the cities. This led to some strange anomalies: the London borough of Westminster returned the most radical MPs, only because property was so expensive there that everyone had the vote, which meant that radical views usually excluded from parliament had to be heard.

Britain in the 19th century was a country where the majority of people rented their accommodation. The Conservative party made it policy to extend property ownership to a wider group in order to fend off threats to property from liberalism, radicalism and socialism. These threats were very real -- Marxism threatened the abolition of private property altogether, and the Liberals and Socialists were generally against it. Meanwhile, as you can read here, withholding rent was a powerful political tool for the working classes. A rent strike in London's East End helped win the Dockers Strike of 1891, for instance, and there were further successful rent strikes during the First World War and in the late 1930s. People who own property tend not to go on "mortgage strike" in support of their brothers in the mines.

What about Japan? Well, occupier-owned homes account for 60.3 % of homes in Japan, the same as the general European level. But, unlike in Britain, ownership in Japan is declining. Many young people are renting, and will rent for life. The Tokyo rental sector is expanding 4% a year, and is at record levels. Meanwhile, ownership is not seen as a good investment; property prices continue a long, slow slump from the absurd over-valuations of the Bubble period.

Journalist, photographer, artist and iMomus all-round superhero Kyoichi Tsuzuki puts a more human face on this situation in his preface to Archilab Japan 2006: Nested in the City. Tsuzuki, author of the Toyko Style photo book, is rather down on architects in general.

"For young people," he writes, "interior design is unimportant. Anything will do, a bit like camping in the mountains. Camping is not a desire in itself. What counts is the desire to be in the mountains. Likewise, young people first choose to live in a city they like. Then they rent a room to live in. As for the rest, they know how to take advantage of what the city offers. Indeed, what could be simpler when meeting with friends than to transform the corner pub into a dining room, the places where one meets for a drink, to dance, listen to music into a living room, or the gym into a bathroom. All these functions can be projected outside because they are available in the city. In the end, only the sleeping function remains attached to the room."

This dependence on local services as extensions of one's tiny living space makes for an effervescent and vital city, with lots of youthful fizz in public places.

"Nowadays," continues Tsuzuki, "young urbanites no longer feel any compelling desire to be anchored... Singles for the most part, they tell themselves that, if they had enough money, they would spend it on travelling abroad. This is the first generation that is really aware of the possibilities available to it, possibilities that no longer require them to become attached to one city. For those broken to life in New York, taking a plane to Paris or Tokyo from Kyushu amounts to virtually the same thing."

Obviously this is a lifestyle I totally recognize and identify with, and places where a lot of people feel this way are places I fit right into. There's something in the spirit, the feel, the texture of towns like this that's like oxygen. And maybe -- just maybe -- what's so liberating is the lack of brick-and-mortar conservatism.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Umm... Oslo is probably the most liberal city on that list, and Vienna is quite conservative. There are a lot of complex reasons and you are simply over your head in this.

[(Anonymous)]

"This dependence on local services as extensions of one's tiny living space makes for an effervescent and vital city, with lots of youthful fizz in public places."

I think that you could take this a step further. I lived in a very small apartment in Western Tokyo for many years, which I definitely regarded as a place to sleep only. And I was in a band with several young transients like those described by Tsuzuki (except that they spend their extra cash on guitars or records). But it seemed like whenever we went to our favorite izakaya or a public bath or used the train, there were old people there too.

The standard line is that Japan has long been a communal society, and onsen and izakaya are surviving proof of this, but the truth is probably much more complicated—having something to do with the modern man's romance with his agrarian (and communal?) ancestors through jidaigeki, etc. Nevertheless, the communal social services persist, and they're enjoyed by both young and old. Maybe this is what you meant by "youthful fizz," but there's quite a bit of aged fizz out there as well.

[(Anonymous)]

I bought a small apartment in Oslo (which is really low on that list) last year and my loan payments and other monthly expenses are now less than they were when I lived in student housing (!)

[diggets.livejournal.com]

When I'm 60, I'll have a paid-off house to live in, having only property taxes and repairs to worry about.

When a life-long renter is 60, he'll have to keep on renting, having pissed away his money on landlords. Only, chances are his income will have dropped considerably. He may be a pensioner.

For me, that is the critical difference between renting and owning.

Who's going to house you when you're old, Momus? Are you sure you will be able to afford an apartment 20 years from now? Will you inflict yourself on some niece or will you go on the dole?

(Incidentally I agree with a previous poster who said an apartment is no place to raise kids.)

[(Anonymous)]

And they'll write on your grave "He paid off his mortgage by the time he was 60!" because that is all they can think of to say.

People are interesting or home-owners. Period, dude.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you your home-owner!

[(Anonymous)]

"People are interesting or home-owners. Period, dude."

This is one of the dumbest posts on a site full of dumb posts.

[(Anonymous)]

You have to have a lot of time to set aside so much time to politic. It becomes a kind of passtime to the idle esp. when rent is so cheap.

You don't have to put in a lot of hours to "The Man" and having "The Man" take the money away from you to put a roof over your head and do upkeep that keeps the building more or less structurally safe.

These cities of perpetual children get a little annoying w/ unsustainable philosophies that end up feeding off the state and others who are "the man."

[(Anonymous)]

You have a tendency to post a lot of pseudo-scientific jibberish. I can't tell if you do this on purpose to get a rise out of people so that they respond or if you are that clueless.

Cheerleading for landlords?

[mdrennan.livejournal.com]

Those are some fairly easy swipes to take at homeowners — generalizing about the bad bougie decorating sense of the mortgage-bound, ha ha. You aren’t actually critiquing property ownership, though; you’re only demonizing property owners. And interestingly, you’ve protected an entire class of property owners from examination: the landlords, whom you need to protect your private right to your living space. It seems you’ve tacitly endorsed the system you are claiming to criticize, and avoided the crucial question: Is it really such a great thing that some people get to make money off of other people just needing a place to live? It seems like the natural extension to your argument would be to call for the creation of some kind of communally owned, semi-temporary housing for those who like to move around in different cities. But what you’re actually calling for is more renters, which means more landlords.

Maybe, as a homeowner (or at least someone who lives with one, and doesn't rent from a landlord) I'm being defensive, but I’m appalled by the idea that so many smart people out there are ready to write me and my kind off just because we really don’t want to bop around to different cities all the time and use gym bathrooms and have dinner gatherings at pubs, or because we want to know that our homes won't be sold out from under us next month by someone who thinks more about real-estate value than human value, or because we really don’t want to have to go back to living with crazy roommates and looking for new apartments all the time.

The thing that worries me the most is how easy it is to get lefties and radicals and anarchists and all the good people to turn on each other and shut each other out: “I’m radicaller than you.” Sometimes there’s some sense in it, sometimes it keeps people checking their walk/talk ratio and such, but in this context it just feels like snobbery to me.

I’m going to go beat my servants now. I really do enjoy your blog, wish my first comment could have expressed that better!

[iampixiedust.livejournal.com]

I like it when you emulate Momus, Nick.

But renting is not as radical as true nomadic living. By renting you still support the state structure and the institutions that support conservatism, or whatever state structure for that matter.

Nomadology, as written about by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, gets more to the point of how exactly the state structure can be defeated. It's only the nomadic war machine that can deconstruct the state. Even the state employs the nomadic war machine to conquer and invade other states. All armies try to balance institutionalization with nomadology. Not that I agree with any of that ethically.

The nomadic tribe is the only thing that held the state from overdeveloping in the past, up until the state began to overdevelop to the extent that it has now spread to encompass nearly 100% of the globe. Previously, nomadic tribes always held the state back by either destroying states or forcing them to diminish their institutions.

The power of the nomadic tribe in its ability to hold back the state from overflourishing -- the instrument which previously prevented the state from destroying the world as the state is doing now -- is what I think, Momus, the Greek demigod, had in mind when he said that houses should have wheels.

Renting or owning makes little difference. Either way you are bound to the nation through money and you must have citizenship or resident status to do either. The idea of land ownership and control of land prevails -- unlike the nomadic tradition of letting nature and the shape of the land determine how one leads ones life.

(I'm not promoting war here, in case anyone misreads me.)

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Sounds similar to Peter Lamborn Wilson's (aka Hakim Bey) notion of Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZs):

http://www.hermetic.com/bey/taz3.html

Very attracted to the idea of a "lark state", but like most people, I'm a responsible coward.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Very interesting passage here:

"As America came into being where once there had been "Turtle Island," Croatan remained embedded in its collective psyche. Out beyond the frontier, the state of Nature (i.e. no State) still prevailed--and within the consciousness of the settlers the option of wildness always lurked, the temptation to give up on Church, farmwork, literacy, taxes-- all the burdens of civilization--and "go to Croatan" in some way or another. Moreover, as the Revolution in England was betrayed, first by Cromwell and then by Restoration, waves of Protestant radicals fled or were transported to the New World (which had now become a prison, a place of exile). Antinomians, Familists, rogue Quakers, Levellers, Diggers, and Ranters were now introduced to the occult shadow of wildness, and rushed to embrace it.

"Anne Hutchinson and her friends were only the best known (i.e. the most upper-class) of the Antinomians--having had the bad luck to be caught up in Bay Colony politics--but a much more radical wing of the movement clearly existed. The incidents Hawthorne relates in "The Maypole of Merry Mount" are thoroughly historical; apparently the extremists had decided to renounce Christianity altogether and revert to paganism. If they had succeeded in uniting with their Indian allies the result might have been an Antinomian/Celtic/Algonquin syncretic religion, a sort of 17th century North American Santeria."

Thing is, a variant of this did come to pass in some pockets of Appalachia; I'm a product of it.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

(cont.)

"...Throughout the 18th century, North America also produced a number of drop-out "tri-racial isolate communities." (This clinical-sounding term was invented by the Eugenics Movement [...].) The nuclei invariably consisted of runaway slaves and serfs, "criminals" (i.e. the very poor), "prostitutes" (i.e. white women who married non-whites), and members of various native tribes. In some cases, such as the Seminole and Cherokee, the traditional tribal structure absorbed the newcomers; in other cases, new tribes were formed. Thus we have the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, who persisted through the 18th and 19th centuries, adopting runaway slaves, functioning as a way station on the Underground Railway, and serving as a religious and ideological center for slave rebellions. The religion was HooDoo, a mixture of African, native, and Christian elements, and according to the historian H. Leaming-Bey the elders of the faith and the leaders of the Great Dismal Maroons were known as "the Seven Finger High Glister."

"The Ramapaughs of northern New Jersey (incorrectly known as the "Jackson Whites") present another romantic and archetypal genealogy: freed slaves of the Dutch poltroons, various Delaware and Algonquin clans, the usual "prostitutes," the "Hessians" (a catch-phrase for lost British mercenaries, drop-out Loyalists, etc.), and local bands of social bandits such as Claudius Smith's.

"An African-Islamic origin is claimed by some of the groups, such as the Moors of Delaware and the Ben Ishmaels, who migrated from Kentucky to Ohio in the mid-18th century. The Ishmaels practiced polygamy, never drank alcohol, made their living as minstrels, intermarried with Indians and adopted their customs, and were so devoted to nomadism that they built their houses on wheels. Their annual migration triangulated on frontier towns with names like Mecca and Medina. In the 19th century some of them espoused anarchist ideals, and they were targeted by the Eugenicists for a particularly vicious pogrom of salvation-by-extermination. [...] As a tribe they "disappeared" in the 1920's, but probably swelled the ranks of early "Black Islamic" sects such as the Moorish Science Temple. I myself grew up on legends of the "Kallikaks" of the nearby New Jersey Pine Barrens [...] The legends turned out to be folk-memories of the slanders of the Eugenicists, whose U.S. headquarters were in Vineland, NJ, and who undertook the usual "reforms" against "miscegenation" and "feeblemindedness" in the Barrens (including the publication of photographs of the Kallikaks, crudely and obviously retouched to make them look like monsters of misbreeding).

"The "isolate communities"--at least, those which have retained their identity into the 20th century--consistently refuse to be absorbed into either mainstream culture or the black "subculture" into which modern sociologists prefer to categorize them. In the 1970's, inspired by the Native American renaissance, a number of groups--including the Moors and the Ramapaughs--applied to the B.I.A. for recognition as Indian tribes. They received support from native activists but were refused official status. If they'd won, after all, it might have set a dangerous precedent for drop-outs of all sorts, from "white Peyotists" and hippies to black nationalists, aryans, anarchists and libertarians-- a "reservation" for anyone and everyone! The "European Project" cannot recognize the existence of the Wild Man-- green chaos is still too much of a threat to the imperial dream of order.

"Essentially the Moors and Ramapaughs rejected the "diachronic" or historical explanation of their origins in favor of a "synchronic" self-identity based on a "myth" of Indian adoption. Or to put it another way, they named themselves "Indians." If everyone who wished "to be an Indian" could accomplish this by an act of self- naming, imagine what a departure to Croatan would take place. That old occult shadow still haunts the remnants of our forests (which, by the way, have greatly increased in the Northeast since the 18-19th century as vast tracts of farmland return to scrub. Thoreau on his deathbed dreamed of the return of "...Indians...forests...": the return of the repressed)."

[iampixiedust.livejournal.com]

This article mixes up piracy too much with revolution. Piracy is a way of life that has nothing to do with revolt. It simply defies stathood in general. Whereas revolution, difficult to define because it is an inexistant period of time when the state is supposedly surmounted and reinstated again in some supposedly better form... hell, I'm not sure what a revolution is, since not one has ever happened. Camus writes a very good book, The Rebel, essays explaining why the rebel lives a paradox, because s/he must either defeat the oppressor to become one, defeat the oppressor to let another oppressor take power, or simply give up trying to defeat the oppressor once s/he realizes that the only other choises s/he has are the former two.

Pirates never rebel. As in a tribe there are no ranks. One holds a position of authority only in so far as one gains the respect of others. One never owns authority in a tribe or among pirates.

[insomnia.livejournal.com]

"Surely it's no accident that people in cities like Berlin, Amsterdam, New York and San Francisco prefer to rent than buy?"

The key word there is "prefer". People in San Francisco don't prefer to rent. They simply cannot afford to buy. As such, they live their lives perpetually paying the mortgage for wealthy speculators who can afford to buy.

[bonsai-human.livejournal.com]

Exactly. The word "prefer" comes from nowhere - Momus, have you got any statistics on this?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

We really get into chicken and egg territory here. When buying is out of the question for the majority, do they rent against their will? Do people post-rationalize necessity as a political choice? Is politics entirely situational -- do we, for instance, only embrace a philosophy championing the rights of the dispossessed, or the unimportance of material things, while we are ourselves dispossessed and deprived?

If it's meaningless to talk about "preference" in a context where people don't really have a choice, it's also meaningless to talk about preference in a world where constraints are removed. Statistics about what people would choose to do in an ideal world would be pretty meaningless. Would anybody own anything in an ideal world? Would money even exist?

[insomnia.livejournal.com]

Evidently, nothing turns people into radicals like cramming them into small, overpriced houses and apartments which they can might never be able to afford and can be evicted from with relatively little notice. ;-)

[vertigoranger.livejournal.com]

I'm 900% (or more!) with you on this one, Nick.

[19091977.livejournal.com]

I think you just mean "i don't want to own a house & i like renting" by this whole pile of words. Speaking of junk philosophy & junk mail... well, here it is. Did this idea need to be rehashed?

[bonsai-human.livejournal.com]

I don't think lining the pockets of the unreconstructed idiot swine that constitute "landlords" in London could be considered a radical act. To me the current rental crisis in many countries heralds nothing so much as a return to feudalism.

So I'm very puzzled as to how renting could be interpreted as good, radical, leftist stuff. The vast majority of people rent because they cannot afford to buy a house, or at least to buy a house they would actually want to live in.

You've completely lost me on this one.

[akabe.livejournal.com]

the sad, ironic twist here is that it's really the people who (like momus) don't have children or who don't buy or build property that should be doing both because, as a type, they'd do a better job than those hung up on the whole thing.

it's our oedipal crank.

Hello

[autojosh.livejournal.com]

I really enjoy reading your blog, but I cannot believe the amount of material that appears on it. Is tnis all original? I feel almost as if I'm reading a magazine. It's all excellent writing. If you don't mind my wondering out loud, how much time do you devote to writing?

Re: Hello

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I don't have a job. I mean, this is my job. Thinking, writing, telling stories, investigating. Like Tintin crossed with a monk!

I spend every morning blogging. Well, a couple of hours, anyway. Then I go out and swim at the local pool (I only just learned how to!), or kickskate around Berlin, go to a bookshop, talk about things with my girlfriend over lunch, meet with friends at night, play with my rabbit, eat, whatever. There are a lot of hours in the day!

But all the time I'm collecting ideas. Not just for Click Opera, but for Wired, or AIGA Voice, or even a song or an art performance. Today, for instance, I got an idea for a song walking down the street, and sang it into a camera. Then a bit later, kickskating, I got an idea for an AIGA Voice piece. And tried to decide whether tomorrow I should blog about postfeminism, or blogging for money, or what it's like to be old, or...

I get my best ideas in water -- either in the bath or in the pool (or sento, if I'm in Japan).

It might sound like a lot of extra work, blogging, but I find there's a synergy between all my activities. Putting more work into one makes them all easier. Ideas ricochet between them all, and getting deeper into one medium (journalism, for instance) helps generate ideas for another (performance art, for instance).

I'm very glad you enjoy it, anyway! Thanks for coming!