Matthew Yglesias reads Richard Florida’s forthcoming Who’s Your City and latches onto the concept that homeownership is incompatible with a transient, creative-class based economy.

There is certainly a lot of accuracy in the observation that current incentives for single-family homeownership are detrimental to communities and the environment (and, to an extent, families and education as well). And the critique in question—that homeownership ties people to place—is certainly a correct assumption.

But I don’t see enough of a critical stance taken by Yglesias or Florida of the underlying premise—that salaried transience is a good thing that we should be supporting. It’s no secret that I’m a huge opponent of New Urbanist garbage, and here’s an example why. For better or worse (I personally feel for better), the United States’ political system is still set up around a Jeffersonian notion of civic involvement inherently tied to associations of place. Even in metropolitan areas, American political and social identity is cemented by the admixture of people into the contingencies of physical space.

In my assessment, this is the most modern and equalitarian of all worldviews. Detaching people from place and making them salaried sharecroppers of post-industrial capitalism trends towards an epistemology of hyper-individualistic Objectivism. Moreover, it’s plainly a stressful way to live: the sociological data on divorce, mental health, and reported levels of happiness confirms that the transient salaryman is living a life of neither individual fulfillment or communal contribution.

Instead of attacking the concept of homeownerhsip, I think what’s needed is a public policy which promotes intelligent, well-articulated subsidies of personal involvement in a spatial context. If we cannot have the destruction of property (a realization the holdover Marxists need to come to), we can achieve a similar effect by the universalization of property. This, not the negation of homeownership, is what leftward modern society ought to aspire to.