Episode 81: Joshua Specht
Summer is over, dear listeners. Sam spent his time reading hate mail from older Americans, while David has just moved around the corner from a senior assisted living facility. But more importantly, Digging A Hole is back for another season.
In this week’s episode, we turn to the history of America’s obsession with land ownership. Here to take us from the rent wars of the 1840s up to the Great Financial Crises, we have Joshua Specht, associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. He joins us to discuss his new book, Property Values: The Rise and Fall of the American Homeowner, which traces the history of American property ownership from the homestead to the modern suburb.
Specht lays out his argument that American history can be understood through two linked ideals: nineteenth-century “landed democracy,” in which widespread land ownership underwrote visions of independence and citizenship, and the twentieth-century “ownership society,” which moved those aspirations to suburban homes. Sam questions whether land ownership and homeownership really belong in a single story and whether Americans might someday manage to untether democracy from owning a piece of land altogether. David, meanwhile, asks whether Specht’s narrative gives too much explanatory power to property ownership and not enough to economic growth and dynamism. He also wonders whether the decisive break in American housing really came with the mortgage revolution of the 1930s or with the rise of anti-growth politics in the 1970s.
Referenced Readings
Property Values: The Rise and Fall of the American Homeowner, by Joshua Specht
Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America, by Joshua Specht
“The Price of Meat,” by Samuel Moyn
“How the Gentry Won: Property Law’s Embrace of Stasis,” by Roderick M. Hills Jr. and David Schleicher
“The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” by Frederick Jackson Turner
Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, by Kenneth T. Jackson
Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century, by Steven Conn