Professor Eugene White of Rutgers challenges the political trope that owning your own home is the American dream in this WSJ piece.
For many people, renting an apartment makes more sense than does owning a house, but for a couple of decades politicians in both major parties have been crowing that they’ve helped to increase the percentage of home ownership, as if that were an unalloyed good for everyone.
Now, let’s suppose that someone could ask Obama about his continuing commitment to the home ownership crusade in light of Professor White’s arguments. I bet we’d get an answer something like this: “There are those people who say it’s better to live in a shack or a cave than to own your own home, but I reject that social Darwinist, Bush/Cheney, anti-poor kind of thinking.”
