Losing a home

Losing one's home is a horrible and, up until now, relatively rare thing. But there are three ways to lose a home that have recently been receiving lots of attention.

(1) The massive increase in foreclosures due to the subprime loan crisis.

(2) Economic development incentives have spread in such a way that municipalities and counties are more willing to use eminent domain to take private homes for the sake of increased property tax/sales tax revenue. (See Supreme Court case Kelo v. City of New London.)

(3) With respect to our discussion here, at least in a rapidly rising real estate market: the prospect of senior citizens on fixed-incomes losing their homes due to an inability to pay their increased property tax.

As I read about the increase in foreclosures, what becomes palpable to me is the fear and anguish that people experience when faced with the prospect of losing their home. Even when a homeowner is fairly compensated--e.g., in the case of a municipality's use of eminent domain and complex economic development tools--many such homeowners are outraged and will fight even a very generous buy-out offer.

One obvious way to understand that anger, fear, and anguish is to recognize that the value of one's home is not the same as its monetary value, and that that former value often far exceeds any monetary value that that house might bring in on the free market (or even in the skewed but more favorable market conditions that sometimes result from economic redevelopment plans).

If we really respected the private lives of citizens, we'd make it harder for government entities to take homes from private citizens. We wouldn't think that that a private space could somehow always be legitimately appropriated, at some specific dollar amount. To thrive, people need both private and public lives; people need to be able to leave the public sphere to seek shelter and comfort in private. People can't lead decent public lives without a decent private life (see Hannah Arendt's reflections on privacy in The Human Condition--they're really quite brilliant).

That doesn't mean that eminent domain should never be used. Public use does sometimes trump private use. Private property rights shouldn't be taken as absolute simpliciter. Sometimes you have to build a road or utility precisely where someone is living. But that's different from saying that your private use of this property is less lucrative to the city than this other kind of private use would be, so we're going to displace you for the sake of these other private citizens.

I gotta stop--more later, in particular about the threat of rising property taxes forcing people out of their homes.