Home Sweet Home. Is It a Fading American Dream?

“The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”    --Maya Angelou, poet

It was home sweet home.

Not the biggest of homes or filled with fancy high tech appliances or a two-car garage or even a dishwasher. Us four kids were the dishwasher. That house didn’t have a finished basement, or a sprawling backyard. The space between our house and the Crifo family homestead next door put us nearly next door to their door. As in 25 feet or so of separation.

It was a Cape. Pretty basic shelter. That’s where my family lived in our early years, back in the nineteen sixties. The home was maybe 1,300 square feet or so, if that much. Center staircase. Modest size kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, and dining room on the first floor. Two bedrooms and a bathroom on the second. In their spare time, my dad and grandfather put up plywood paneling floor to ceiling, to make a family room, in the basement.

Home sweet home. Home sweet “starter home” too.

That’s the quaint term used to describe a style of house that once was very common in the United States. A home of limited size, nothing fancy. Just enough space for a growing family, and just the right price too. Perfect for young people or first-time home buyers or blue-collar folk or veterans returning from war or retirees downsizing or people of modest means. 

There was a time when to buy and own your own home, maybe a starter home, was central to the American dream. It was within reach of most people too. Once the supply of starter homes was plentiful. Zoning rules and land costs still made it possible to put up a Cape on a half-acre lot.

But not so much anymore.

Not after the rocket like rise in home prices that has marked the past few years, years when in the United States the average price for a home rose from $391,000 in 2020 to $453,000 by the end of 2021, an increase of 16 percent in one year. This year home prices are up by another 15 percent.

In the greater Boston area where I live, the average home now costs $900,000.  To afford that your household needs an income of at least $135,000, and that’s after a twenty percent down payment. Even out towards western Massachusetts and beyond, the median home price in the Bay State is a whopping $625,000.

And not a starter home to be found.

Not when buildable land is scarce, and a buildable lot is so expensive. Not when a town like the one I call home, has set of zoning regulations that clocks in at 109 pages. Not when, as in most Boston suburbs, you have to have a big lot for one house, and you can’t build on a mother-in-law apartment, and you have to be set back very far from the neighbors and you’re not allowed to subdivide your land and build clustered housing and so on and so on.

I’ll confess I embody the challenge of housing, its growing inequity. I live in a four-bedroom two car garage house, all by myself. (I’m not the owner.) I mean I absolutely love it. It’s my home, at least for now, where I find shelter from the storm of life on some days. Where I host loved ones around the dining room table. It contains all my stuff. I have lived in this home longer than any other place in my six plus decades of life.  It is home sweet home.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all Americans, all humans, had access to affordable housing, to places where they could live in safety and serenity with their loved one? Places that were within economic reach. Wouldn’t it be great if we could again build starter homes for anyone who wanted a home?   

A beautiful bungalow. A diminutive Cape.  A regular sized ranch. A simple split level.  

The average size of an American home has increased since from 1,300 square feet in 1960 to 2,200 square feet in 2019. In that same time the average number of residents has decreased from 3.6 people per household to a little more than two people per household.  

WHAT?!

To have a place to call home, and to call it all your own is a human dream for many.  From the moment God created the first humans in their first home, a garden, we have always longed for home. Home, both metaphorically and spiritually and physically too. A real dwelling place.  With a little space for living and a little green for growing.

Is that too much to ask? Right now, in much of the United States, yes. Can we change zoning laws, subsidize home costs, or offer more government guaranteed low mortgage rates, just a few ideas it easier to build starter homes again? Yes, we can.

Home sweet home. It’s up to us to make that dream come true for the many and not just the few.  

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.