NAR Centennial: 100 Years in Celebration of the American Dream: Chapter Two

Homeownership in America

Homeownership benefits not only the owners themselves, but also the community society at large. Is there an ideal more deeply ingrained in American culture? Probably not. In 1900, fewer than half of U.S. households owned their own home. Today the number approaches 70 percent. Perhaps no group has done more to promote the ideal of a home-owning nation than the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS®.

“Widespread homeownership is the bulwark of democracy,” declared the association journal in 1934, in a resolution thanking President Franklin Roosevelt and the Congress for creating the Federal Housing Administration, legislation in which NAR played a key role.

Ten years earlier, the association — then known as the National Association of Real Estate Boards — had added a preamble to its Code of Ethics, opening with the words: “Under all is the land. Upon its wise utilization and widely allocated ownership depends the survival and growth of free institutions and of our civilization.”

That phrase lives on today as a touchstone for the association’s mission of expanding home-ownership opportunities. In 2003, NAR President Cathy Whatley said in her REALTOR® Magazine column, “Ownership brings about a sense of belonging, an emotional connection, not just to the home itself but also to the neighborhood and community in which home owners live and work.”

As early as the 1940s, most Americans identified themselves as middle class, and owning a home was one of the key ways they defined their status, said Jeffrey Hornstein in his 2005 book A Nation of REALTORS® (Duke University Press). “The cultural and political work of the REALTORS® and their allies in Washington and elsewhere definitively associated the American dream with homeownership,” Hornstein wrote. “Today it is virtually redundant to speak of the ‘American dream of homeownership.’”

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