How the Homeownership Dream Went Sour

"Most years, President Bush has celebrated June - National Homeownership Month - with a splashy speech. Not this year. This year, he stayed as far from the topic as he could get... What went wrong?

First, a demonstration of the sheer size of the political bet the Republicans placed on exhorting as many Americans as possible to own their own homes. Exhibit A: the March, 2005 special issue on the 'Ownership Society' of the magazine of the American Enterprise Institute, of the conservative movement's flagship think tanks. There are, lead author James Glassman wrote, three aims of Bush's dreamed-of Owernship Society: to 'reform' Social Security, to 'boost the economy by cutting taxes on dividends,' and 'to make home buying easier.'

The only author to raise any sort of caveat - that home prices are skyrocketing out of control - is the neoconservative geographer Joel Kotkin. He blamed, you guessed it, liberals: 'Environmental regulations and other growth-constraining factors have inflated housing prices.'

As we'll see in the next post, that's absurd."