The Anxiety of the Forever Renter

I keep reading about how homeownership is out in the new economy. It’s now a liability, not an ambition. It’s an anachronism in an age when nothing remains permanent anymore, when no one stays in the same job—let alone the same city, or even the same career—long enough to dent a 30-year mortgage. Homeownership represents the opposite of all the values that economists say will matter from now on—flexibility, mobility, adaptability—in a country where the Company Man will now work for himself, selling his portable ideas instead of his labor.

At the end of this last decade, the census captured an unexpected slowdown in the mass migration that’s been flowing south for a generation from the Northeast to the Sunbelt. Families had been picking up and moving by the tens of thousands to places like Tucson and Tampa. Then, suddenly, over the last couple of years, this great migration stalled. It stalled on such a scale that whole congressional seats stopped moving.