At Home in America

By Lance Olsen, Unfiltered 5-31-06

At Home in America
by Lance Olsen

In one of the most ironic twists of the transPacific boom of logging and building these past three decades, many Americans still accepted the comforting illusion that forests fell to build homes for ordinary people. If there is a single test that could determine whether America's permissive logging spree was intended to meet real human need, this would be it.

Alas, caught in the midst of its exuberant boom, America failed that test. During the successive administrations of Reagan-Bush, Bush-Quayle, Clinton-Gore, Bush-Cheney and the coinciding Congresses, there was little sign that politicians had learned to aim construction policy where it was most needed.

By 1995, the U.S. Census Bureau's American Housing Survey would report a "… 43 percent decline over the last two decades in the number of low-rent units in the private housing market." Just in the first term of Clinton-Gore, the House Appropriations Committee slashed the budget for low-income housing by $7 billion.

In 1995, Winton Pitcoff wrote a penetrating analysis of the housing crisis for March/April issue of Dollars & Sense magazine. Pitcoff wrote that, "Thirty years ago the nation boasted a surplus of housing affordable to low income people. Today there is a shortage of more than four million units."

Pitcoff added that the supply of affordable housing declined by 900,000 units just from 1996-1998 alone. That fall occurred during the second term of Clinton-Gore.

Meanwhile, Congress and successive administrations backed tax breaks that were subsidizing large and expensive homes for buyers in the top fifth of America's income distribution. According to Dollars & Sense magazine, these permissive tax breaks, granted under the Mortgage Interest Deduction, amounted to $82 billion in 1999 alone. Cushing Dolbeare, founder of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, was cited in a Dollars & Sense interview saying, "If we were willing to spend as much on low and middle income housing as we do on the Mortgage Interest Deduction, we'd have more than enough to solve the housing crisis."

It's not that Congress had not passed law to offer housing for the nation's unrich. Indeed, the Federal Housing Administration was set up for that purpose. FHA even had an insurance fund to cover banks' losses if poorly paid borrowers couldn't meet their loan payments.

However, in June, 1990, Associated Press business reporter John Cunniff disclosed that the program had been twisted to reward those who didn't need it and deny loans to those who did. That twist, according to official records examined by Cunniff, caused "incredible losses" for the program's insurance fund, threatening to break it as effectively as the similar funds for banks and S&Ls were broken.

It turned out that 100 percent of the government-insured loans intended for the needy were going to the well-off, and the bigger the loan, the more likely it was to end up in foreclosure. An expert Cunniff contacted for an explanation told him that, while the public might lose money on these bad loans, the brokers who set up financing made more money on the larger ones than they would on smaller loans needed for the nation's poor.

Gifford Pinchot, an early head of the U.S. Forest Service, would stand angrily from his grave if he knew of all this. "The rightful use and purpose of our natural resources," Pinchot wrote in 1947, " is to make all the people strong and well, able and wise, well-clothed, well-housed…with equal opportunity for all and special privilege for none."

Back then, if only briefly, America's political leadership was listening, and responsive to ordinary needs and dreams. In 1949, America passed its Housing Act, which stated that it is the policy of the United States to provide "…a decent home and suitable environment for every American family."

More recently, preaching a public line of family values while promoting the nation's combined logging-building boom, politicians of both major parties have instead provided the means by which every wealthy family could afford extravagant housing.

During booms, the Wall Street Journal would report in early 2000, homes get bigger. Like Americans' waistlines, the Journal observed, the new American home was getting much bigger, and more extravagant. While affordable housing was uncomfortably rare for the Americans who most needed it, the fortunate were demanding homes with "more bedrooms, more bathrooms, and more flourishes than ever before."

Architects and even the builders of luxury homes were noticing the trend. An architect told the Journal that the trend was "appalling." He said that the bigger-is-better trend was about showing off to neighbors. In his opinion, people buying luxury homes were saying, "I can be a 1920s tycoon like anybody else."

One American builder of luxury homes interviewed by the Wall Street Journal was quoted saying, "Does anybody need all this? No."

Indeed, the Journal observed, "Need is hardly a consideration these days." I have yet to meet the forest/wildlife conservationist who disagrees.

Psychologists have also taken note. In 1981, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton gave it a close look in their book, The Meaning of Things. The two psychological scientists say that "a habit of consumption can become an end in itself." Locked into "deadly inertia," they say, the drive to possess more and more becomes an "addiction" that the researchers regard as "terminal materialism."

As Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton see it, when people enter this state of mind, "… the earth, the forests, the dwellings, and the psychic energy of people can all be mined for the specific utility of the transaction, regardless of what wider consequences or outcomes these acts might cause," including a self-endangering foreign policy. Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton note that rich nations "…now consume an inordinate amount of planetary resources, whereas the others look on with envy and increasing rage."

(Note: Earlier versions of this article appeared in Bear News, Progressive Populist, and Wild Mountain Times)

Next: Greenspan, The White House, and Congress set the stage for forest decline and homeowner pain

Lance Olsen is project director of Missoula's Cold Mountain, Cold Rivers. He can be reached at lance@wildrockies.org

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