Is Home Ownership Outdated?

As a record number of banks carpe domus ("seize the home"), and as jobs keep shuffling around in a more mobile, fluid society, one has to ask: is home ownership outdated?

And I don't mean in terms of fads, as if owning a home were akin to owning a bean bag chair or a lava lamp. Fads come and go, but the underlying structure stays the same.

What I'm asking is whether the underlying structure is changing. After all, it used to be that you could graduate high school, get a good manufacturing job with enough pay and benefits to provide for your family, and retire with a healthy pension. One job in one town for one life.

Owning a home made sense. You stayed put and your grandchildren were raised in the same hometown as you. You paid off your mortgage and maybe fueled your retirement off of its sale, leveraging its increased value.

But in today's world, that kind of life is as anachronistic as the milkmen and paper boys that went along with it. By 2006, workers between the ages of 18 and 38 changed jobs an average of 10 times; many times, switching cities to do so. And, with housing prices falling, a home is no longer a retirement tool.

This new way of living will end up drastically changing the way we work and live. As Richard Florida's new book The Great Reset points out, American society most likely (and in some cases already is) going to become a 'rentership society', rather than an 'ownership society'.

That's not to say ownership will disappear altogether. Indeed, it will end up making good real estate agents that much more in demand, and it will mean those out to own a home will be doing so for the right reasons, not just because they heard it was a good investment.