Is the American Dream Found Mainly in Home Ownership?
One of the most memorable commercials from Super Bowl LIX was the Rocket Mortgage commercial on home ownership. To the tune of Take Me Home, Country Roads, it was a powerful moment when the 128 million people watching the Super Bowl at home joined 66,000 people in the stadium and sang together.
For as long as people can remember, owning a house has been one of the most important goals associated with the American Dream. The idea originated even before James Truslow Adams defined the American Dream in his book The Epic of America in 1931. It seems like linking home ownership to the American Dream started in the late nineteenth century with Seymour Dexter and his creation of the U.S. League of Local Building and Loan Associations. The story of Dexter and others is part of the book Building Home: Howard F. Ahmanson and the Politics of the American Dream by Eric John Abrahamson, which I now feel compelled to read to understand more about this important episode in the crafting of the American Dream.
Others have related the idea of home ownership even further back. Dexter himself mentioned it can be traced back to Thomas Jefferson who believed that farmers, who were owners of productive property, would sustain the independence and virtue of the citizenry and the health of the democracy, according to Abrahamson. There are many episodes throughout U.S. history where government bodies and other institutions were set up to promote home ownership as a staple of the American Dream. But it seems like the boom of home ownership and the focus on it took greater shape after the end of the Second World War with the rise of the suburbs and the GI Bill. Ever since the 1960s, home ownership has stayed above 63%, so it’s clearly an important feature of the American Dream.
However, in surveys about the American Dream, even though owning a house is important, it is not as essential to the American Dream as people might think.
Archbridge Institute American Dream Snapshot, 2024
As we show in our latest survey, freedom of choice and having a good family life were listed as more essential than owning a home. And this was true across various demographic characteristics including age, education level, income, and even political affiliation as we can see in column D in the next graph.
Archbridge Institute American Dream Snapshot, 2024
Owning a house is important to the American Dream because people might relate it to financial security and not worrying about rent, or mainly having a good family life, which was heavily featured during the Super Bowl commercial and as we just saw in our own survey as well. However, it is not the main feature of the American Dream, and in many cases, given the current interest rates, trying to purchase a home might give people more worries than happiness right now.
It seems that a house has more to do with what resonates with people in terms of family life and independence and not necessarily the achieving of the American Dream in and of itself. It’s where a family lives and builds memories. It’s where love starts and grows between parents, parents and children, siblings, multi-generational families, and even the love for pets. We should certainly acknowledge that it also represents challenges and sadness that comes when a family breaks because of divorce. It’s where one of the most important endeavors we have as human beings starts: building a family and helping our kids succeed in life by developing the skills they need. It represents the vastness of family development—or even human development—so people might be attached to that idea of a house as representing all of those stages of life. But the house is just a medium for the events—something that is important but not as valuable as what goes on inside that physical structure.
This is why I think people in our own surveys continue to answer as we see in the tables above: what they think is essential to the American Dream is freedom of choice and a good family life.
One of the most memorable lines for me from that Super Bowl commercial was, “Everyone deserves their shot at the American Dream.” And in that sense, I am in full agreement that we should all be able to dream big and take our shot. We need an environment of freedom and individual responsibility that supports pursuing the American Dream, but we must realize that achieving it is mainly about personal agency, dreaming, and acting on those dreams.
We don’t need to wait until we have XYZ; we don’t need to wait for someone else to give us that shot. It depends on us, and we can accomplish much more than simply owning a house. We need to dream big, believing it is possible, and just keep taking each next step.