In her new book, Brave New Home, Diana Lind, executive director of the Arts + Business Council of Greater Philadelphia, and occasional RECORD contributor, delves into her fundamental belief that many problems besetting America connect to the historic fixation on the single-family house. Even before the pandemic, 38 million households in the United States—nearly one in three—were “cost burdened,” meaning they paid more than 30 percent of their income on rents or mortgages, and homelessness has only been growing in cities across the country since then. (In 2017, the typical sales price of a single-family home was 4.2 times the median household income; in 1988, the ratio was 3.2.) The lack of viable and sustainable housing choices, combined with exclusionary housing regulations, has made housing grow more expensive every decade. Add to this the possibility that up to 40 million more people face residential evictions in 2021, and you could safely argue we are in a housing emergency.

The dream of owning a single-family house is as American as apple pie, and Lind systematically lays out a strong and compelling argument to stop idealizing this outdated thinking, on the basis that it is unaffordable, unhealthy, and out of reach for so many, and instead, she envisions a future where single-family housing, as such, is not the norm. She explores how America was transformed from a country of towns and cities where shared living, multipurpose building, and cheap temporary housing were very common to a country where single-family homes dominate. For example, in 1920, fewer than half of all Americans were homeowners. In the postwar period, changes to the federal income tax system, including allowing homeowners to deduct local property taxes and rental income from their adjusted gross income, made homeownership more desirable. Of course, this became a great way to build wealth through appreciation, but it was largely accessible only to white families with stable jobs—resulting in double-digit disparities between white and Black families in homeownership.