Revolutionary (Real Estate) Values
The cost of homeownership can have a price in social stability
This is an installment of “Sestercenntenial Moments,” marking the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution and its memory in our national life. For more on the background of the series, see here.
Over the July 4th weekend I paid a visit to one of my favorite places: Concord, Massachusetts. It’s a little town I’ve visited regularly for over 20 years because I routinely take students to visit the National Park Service site where the first major battle of the American Revolution took place in 1775. I also take them to Concord Pond and the Old Manse, where a half-century later, Concord became the site of a cultural revolution in kicking off the Transcendental movement with figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne (who provided a useful fillip of skepticism about the movement). This time, I was there with family to revisit the state-of-the-art Concord Museum—it had been a while; the place has had quite the makeover—and a beloved haunt: the Concord Bookstore.
Concord is a prosperous town, and pretty much has been since it was founded almost 400 years ago. It is strategically located about 20 miles from Boston—close enough to be an economic lifeline—once for goods, now for commuters—but far enough away to be a bucolic alternative to the city. Average home prices are over $1 million; the cost of living there is almost 50% higher than the national average. We of course are living in a time of high inflation, and homeownership for Millennials and Gen Z is largely considered out of reach.
This has long been an old story in Concord. Two hundred and fifty years ago, real estate prices were also high—so high as to price out young people. “There were too many sons and not enough productive land for all,” reports Robert Gross in his wonderful book The Minutemen and their World, first published in 1976 to coincide with the Bicentennial and reissued periodically ever since. “The problem was not new, but it had been getting worse for half a century.”
There were two basic responses to what Gross called “a land hunger” that grew pronounced beginning in the 1720s. The first, of course, was to leave, a westward migration in which Concord itself had once been an outpost. Now young people headed out to the farther reaches of Massachusetts—Worcester, Grafton, Williamstown—and into the frontier of upstate New York, later immortalized in James Fenimore Cooper classics like Last of the Mohicans (because, of course, the story migration was also a story of displacement, which Cooper infused with a grandeur that is most fully realized in the 1992 film version starring Daniel Day-Lewis). Beyond that were the wilds of the Ohio country—and, eventually, California.
The other response, literally and figuratively, was to dig in. Concord was losing ground 250 years ago this summer. Boston, once the largest city in the colonies, had been overtaken by Philadelphia (founded a half-century later), and would soon fall to third place behind New York. Virginia and Pennsylvania were larger in both size and population than Massachusetts, which, lacking good soil for large-scale agriculture, was far more invested in mercantile trade than either. That’s why some of the new regulations emanating from London in the aftermath of the French and Indian War in the 1760s were so inflammatory there in particular in the decade that followed. People were determined to keep what they had—and anxious about the prospect of losing it. These are the kinds of forces that lead people to take steps they might otherwise not take. It is perhaps no surprise that Massachusetts in general, and Concord in particular, was the leading edge of revolt, not simply because of its long tradition of dissent—it was founded by religious radicals—but the underlying economic pressures that are always an important driving factor in historic change.
It is a truism of all times and places that revolutions are usually led by young people. It is a truism of this time and place that we are being led by a gerontocracy. It will be replaced. Sooner or later the cost of living will fall. It remains to be seen at what price.
And that’s the way it seems.