The year before I got married, I moved back in with my parents. It was among the worst and longest years of my life. The arrangement was complicated by unforeseen circumstances: My newly divorced sister and her son also moved in with my parents, and my nephew stayed in what had once been my bedroom—with no remaining bedroom in the house. No big deal, I thought. I assured my parents I could just sleep on the couch for a year. I needed a place to stay, I was too religiously traditional to move in with my fiancé, and a year would be over in no time.
I was wrong. The mental picture I have of that time—of getting ready for marriage and trying to finish a doctoral dissertation—is of my car. Almost irresistibly, it became the “place” where I spent more time than anywhere else. Deprived of privacy, the car became the only place for my fiancé and I to talk, and—not really having an office or place to read or write—I was constantly on the go, migrating from coffee shop to library. The rest of my life that year was spent borrowing space from other people, permanently mindful of the time left on the parking meter. Notably, during that time, I couldn’t have told you what was going on in my local community, or who the mayor was, or what the city council was dealing with.
The Trump administration’s recent suggestion of a 50-year mortgage brought to mind that miserable time. There is much to say about what this would mean in financial terms. It would cost buyers tens of thousands of dollars in interest payments to lenders, drive up housing prices by increasing demand without expanding supply, and fail to create generational wealth while only making the monthly expense of home “ownership” marginally more bearable. But what is more easily overlooked but arguably more pressing is how this lifelong renting—in effect, what paying off a 50-year mortgage is—would condition life and what that conditioning would mean politically.
“To introduce permanent renting is to take away political freedom.”
In a word, to introduce permanent renting is to take away political freedom, and not just because of economic disadvantages. More fundamentally, permanent renting conditions people in ways that are antithetical to political freedom. Not having a secure place in the world shapes you, and what it shapes you into is the kind of person who isn’t able truly to engage in politics, even if there are no explicit legal barriers keeping you from participating. Impermanence conditions people out of political life. So not only would the 50-year mortgage intensify and aggravate the problem it purports to solve—people’s ability to buy their own homes—but in the process it would also effectively disenfranchise the millions of people who would come to live under its antipolitical conditions.
We already see renters exhibiting the symptoms of this antipolitical condition. The New York Times’s Ezra Klein noted recently that one of the key political challenges with housing policy is that renters tend not to vote in local elections, especially in primaries, leaving political decisions to those who already own homes. This observation isn’t a new one. Tocqueville described the great political benefit of the chaotic American democratic system in which citizens had a patriotic sense of ownership of the decisions that affected them, in contrast to countries in Europe where “the natives consider themselves as a kind of settlers, indifferent to the fate of the spot on which they live,” and where “the citizen is unconcerned as to the condition of his village, the police of his street, the repairs of the church or of the parsonage; for he looks upon all these as unconnected with himself, and as the property of a powerful stranger whom he calls the Government.”
This antipolitical attitude, in which people resign themselves to living without political freedom—that is, living with the decisions made for them—is not a moral failure of the renter. It is constitutive of our condition when we inhabit a world without a place of our own, when we can no longer say that something and some place is truly ours.
The work that brings these connections to light most plainly is Hannah Arendt’s classic 1958 book The Human Condition. Arendt’s argument is complex and wide-ranging but at its core lies the insight that human existence isn’t a mere expression of some unchanging human nature; rather, the material situation of human beings radically shapes the kinds of people we are. Human life occurs under conditions; humans are conditioned. Different conditions render different expressions of human life, all of which will seem perfectly natural. Arendt’s aim, then, is to detail what conditions are hospitable to human freedom, which she understands as the capacity people have to take action together when they have emerged from the private sphere and into the public. As it turns out, most human conditions are not amenable to freedom.
The first condition of human life, and the one most hostile to human freedom, is our animality. With the rest of nature, we are part of the cyclical and endless metabolic life process of birth, consumption, decay, and death. Animal life is life oriented to survival. In the ancient world, Arendt observes, people won their freedom by offloading the burden of survival activities to slaves who, as a result, lived without exercising those human qualities that differentiate us from other animals. The slave was the paragon of human existence under the condition of “labor”: the animal laborans, the laboring animal, deprived of individuality, confined to the household, and occupied with the endlessly repeating activities of the life process, living not as a full human being but as “only one, at best the highest, of the animal species which populate the earth.”
But in a way that exceeds other animals, humans are utterly unique and unrepeatable, and this individuality shows itself in the relatively permanent world that humans have made to shield ourselves from nature. The first human step away from animality is not labor, but “work,” the activity of making a durable world comprising effectively permanent objects. It is only in such a manufactured world that people can leave the private, domestic sphere and make their appearance in the public sphere as distinctive individuals and come together to act—to exercise political freedom. But, of course, this public sphere is inseparably bound with the private sphere: The homes in which people dwell are a central part of the permanent world where it becomes possible to differentiate between the private and public spheres, and only when people have secured their private home and life’s necessities can they enter the public sphere.
“We can never be free from necessity when our place in the world is insecure.”
This linking of property and enfranchisement, Arendt points out, stretches back to the ancient Greeks, for whom private property was requisite for political participation. Nor was the relationship of private property to political freedom arbitrary. The private sphere is the realm of necessity, and only by freeing ourselves from the constant labor of necessity are we freed for the public sphere. We can never be free from necessity when our place in the world is insecure. It is for this political reason, and not simply to build generational wealth, that we should strive to be a nation of homeowners, treating renting ideally as a temporary, transitional need. Even though the law no longer restricts the vote to those who own property, the reality remains that those without property live under antipolitical conditions.
Under the condition of work—that is, of making a world—the human is, says Arendt, homo faber, man the fabricator. But making, and its accompanying economic activity, isn’t politics. Political life, which is the space of freedom, consists of speech and action, of exercising power through deliberating and legislating, judging and forgiving. The permanent world doesn’t guarantee political freedom, but the public sphere requires a durable world. Maintaining that world, including its availability to people, is the condition that makes possible public life and therefore public freedom.
In light of Arendt’s analysis, recent developments in our culture become politically remarkable, not just economically irritating. Among these developments is the slow advance of subscriptions. While these are typically for digital products, the fact remains that the things to which we subscribe no longer take their place among the world of permanent objects, but are, as it were, swallowed up in an endless process, not so different from the metabolism of the life that requires our constant labor. The product is never really completed and never really purchased.
Paying for Apple Music or Adobe Acrobat is relatively harmless, but an economic model that is progressively turning more and more things into subscriptions—and renting is certainly a form of subscription—is creating conditions that are antithetical to human life freed for public life. As I suggested elsewhere, what was once the animal laborans is today homo subscribens, man the subscriber. The possibility of a 50-year mortgage would only confirm this reversion back to the life process, ensuring that people today are no freer than laborers bound by endless necessity.
The 50-year mortgage is therefore much more than a stupid economic idea. Given how frequently voices in news media have howled about the authoritarianism of the Trump presidency, it is dismaying to see their relative silence about a proposal that would effectively disenfranchise millions for decades. For all the talk of “our democracy,” there has been a haunting silence about economic conditions that leave untouched the machinery of democracy but drain from citizens the republican spirit that alone drives people to take care of their country as they do their homes.
A society of permanent renters is a society of visitors, preoccupied with the urgent survival needs of the moment, resigned to the power of those few who have somehow won their freedom. That society would indeed have no right to call itself a democracy.