“A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.” – Benjamin Franklin
They say home is where the heart is, and for most, that is true. Last month, I had a conversation with a naturalized friend from Europe. I asked if they missed being back home, and they responded much the same way I react when referencing my own family in the eastern United States. There are things that I miss about being back east, but given five to seven days away, I long for the comfort of my own bed. We have long recognized the importance of a place to call home. A home offers stability, where we can nourish both our bodies and our souls. A home provides security from the unknown beyond its walls. A home is where you raise a family, put down roots, and build community.
Until the age of 10, I grew up in a modest duplex. My mother was a waitress, and my father was an electronics technician with a simple electronics diploma. In 1980, my parents moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for a five-dollar-an-hour job offer. That’s where I was born. Eventually, my father was transferred to Atlanta, Georgia, for a job promotion. My parents divorced when I was five, but we remained in the same duplex until I was around ten years old. My mother bought her first home around 1990. She was twenty-nine or thirty at the time. It was a modest 1,600-square-foot stick-built home in a subdivision of Atlanta. I felt housed but never homed until then. She’s still there today.
My wife and I bought our first home in 2010, also around the age of twenty-nine or thirty. It was a 1950s brick rambler in South Salt Lake. From my conversations with neighbors, it was known as the drug house in the neighborhood and was previously owned by an elderly woman and occupied by her drug addicted grandchildren. True to reputation, I found pill bottles and needles in the yard and crawl space as I renovated it. With six months of sweat equity, I turned it into a lovely home. We did benefit from the federal First-Time Home Buyer’s tax credit in light of the 2008 financial crisis. I worked to save up the down payment while my wife was in school, and we sought out a property with good bones and manageable renovation requirements. Our first child was born there.
A commonly voiced concern among Generation Z is access to affordable housing, which is especially relevant given that ten years ago, Barack Obama signed laws and executive orders explicitly aimed at promoting affordable housing. In 2016, he signed the Housing Opportunity Through Modernization Act and released the Housing Development Toolkit with the express intent of making housing denser by promoting multi-family housing developments. Though much of this policy was put on the back burner during Trump’s first Administration, it was once again enforced during the Biden Administration.
One of the stipulations of these efforts was controlling zoning and new development by placing restrictions on builders and municipalities to receive existing government funding and low-income Section 8 subsidies. Have you noticed an influx of apartment developments in Eastern Idaho? That is a direct reflection of federal housing policy. In my opinion, it is these policies that have left Generation Z in a permanent state of being renters.
Aside from local geopolitics, Eastern Idaho reflects broader trends in homeownership. Nationwide, new construction is trending toward multi-family housing, and rents continue to rise. If this is not a reflection of international goals to make everyone a tenant of the financial class, it certainly feels that way. In 2016, the World Economic Forum painted a picture of the world in 2030, envisioning a carefree lifestyle unburdened by personal possessions, such as a home. The financial class is all too eager to oblige by acquiring residential properties and bundling them into real estate investment trusts. This should not be.
The Trump Administration, for its part, has recently proposed fifty-year mortgage terms to improve access to home ownership. While some have criticized the idea, I’m not entirely opposed to it. Wise home buyers will use lower monthly payments to gain access to property ownership while looking for opportunities to refinance and pay off their homes early. This, however, is not a replacement for a reversal of Obama-era Democratic housing policy. If we want to reverse course over the next decade, we must reconsider and reprioritize single-family home construction over multi-family housing units.
Many pundits wishing to create generational envy and strife point to lifestyle creep as the reason for our housing divide. The boomers claim that Generation Z spends too much money on luxuries, while Generation Z counters that the boomers have inflated costs and left a world out of reach. In part, they are both correct. My grandparents purchased their first home in the early 1960s, a modest three-bedroom, 1,500-square-foot split-level for $26,000. It pales in comparison to most of the entry-level homes offered today, and my grandparents passed away in that same house in 2023. Generation Z needs to reconsider what entry-level is, but so do builders and municipalities.
Recently, Bannock County administered a survey on zoning and land use. I was sure to participate, as the continued development of multi-family housing units weighs heavily on the minds of many people, including both tenants and neighbors. If Pocatello wishes to build community, massive apartment developments that bring a transient population, low wages, and divert resources from single-family dwellings are an impediment. Residents must ask what kind of community they wish to live in, and then consider the politicians and policies they endorse.
Photo by Tierra Mallorca on Unsplash
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