Event Date
The Contested Remaking of Landed Security in America
The transformation of household life in America is often interpreted through the lens of financialization—homeowners' intensified orientation toward homes as assets. However, in important ways, the postwar home had long been “assetized”—reduced to exchange value rather than the sites of productive and commercial life that anchored older notions of landed independence. Drawing on two historical case studies, I propose a fuller theory of what changed since the 1980s, involving the shifting foundations of homes as sources of economic security. I trace divergent efforts to turn homes into liquid and short-term resources by supporting the deregulation of second mortgages (for home equity extraction) and the relaxation of zoning restrictions on home-based commerce and tenanting in the 1980s. Advocates for what I term “liquid homeownership” envisioned a shift away from a postwar regime I term “asset homeownership.” Between the 1930s and 1980s, mortgage regulations and zoning rules built a dam around the single-family home, protecting it from devaluation but “locking in” home equity, while tying homeowners to formal labor markets. In the late 1970s, intersecting crises of inflation and labor restructuring propelled divergent household strategies to re-invent homeownership from a long-term to a short-term, liquid economic resource. From these cases, I theorize the macro-historical role of land-use and mortgage rules in shaping the structural relationship between homeowners and markets. At different times in American history, lax or stringent regulations have transformed the extent to which homes can be sites of work, production, commerce, rent extraction, and credit access, defining institutional pathways for landed security.