 The American Dream and Private Property: A Historical Perspective on the Value of Homeownership in American Culture, Politics, and EconomicBradley Smith ()
Post-Print from HAL Abstract: This paper examines the evolution of the close links forged in the United States between housing policy, financial regulation, and the development of an American way of life that sees home ownership as one of the supreme values of American culture. New Deal policies restructured the real estate market to make suburban home ownership more accessible to the middle classes during the three post-war decades. However, the new economic conditions of the 1970s threatened this relative democratization of home ownership. Deregulation and various financial innovations were then conceived as a solution to enable modest-income households to also access the "American dream" thanks to the liberalization of the credit system and the real estate market. The subprime crisis revealed the fragility of a neoliberal development model in which the American dream was increasingly financed by debt due to wage stagnation, while subprime loans spread throughout the system via securitization. Keywords: Homeownership Policies; American dream; Neoliberalism; Well-being; Subprime Crisis (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published in Research seminar: "Theories of the Good Life: From the Agora to the American Dream", Karen Scott, Mar 2017, Penryn, University of Exeter, United Kingdom There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04380163 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Post-Print from HAL |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.