Miguel and Margarita Garcia are Habitat homeowners in El Mirage, Ariz.

Why Own a Home?

By Nicolas P. Retsinas

Why own a home? Why should Habitat volunteers dedicate their time and money to help people own their homes? The questions bear asking.

Homeownership is not an innate need, like the need for food or clothing. People need shelter, but they do not "need" a deeded right to that shelter.

	'... One reason many low-income families cannot buy homes is not the monthly cost--many can pay that. ... The down payment is the hurdle.'

Americans may see homeownership as "the American dream," but other societies in other times have dreamed different dreams. Medieval serfs chafed to own land, but the land was their livelihood; and land ownership translated into economic and political freedom. Before the U.S. government established reservations, Native Americans did not recognize the concept of land ownership:The notion that an individual might own a plot was alien. In the developing world, people crave safe, sound housing--they are not fixated on the deed.

Furthermore, homeownership does not guarantee decent, safe, sound housing. In some countries, like many in Latin America and Africa, homeownership rates are high--higher than in the United States; yet many of those homes are shacks, without electricity, plumbing or ventilation.Title to land is blurry and often non-existent.

Nor is homeownership a social panacea. Throughout the world, many people are poor, uneducated, unemployed and/or socially alienated. Homeownership will not right those ills. In stepping over the threshold of his own home, an owner does not find a job, or get health care, or repair a fractured life.

So we in housing--as volunteers and as professionals--return to the question: "Why?"

In the developing world, people need basic, safe, sound shelters--walls, roofs, windows, plumbing, access to clean water. In Ghana or Sri Lanka, electricity is a luxury. Habitat volunteers help build those homes. If the Habitat affiliate gives the Ghanaian or Sri Lankan family a deed to that home, the deed is secondary. Habitat's prime objective is to move the family out of a hovel.

In the developed world, poor people live in housing that is palatial by the standards of the developing world: A Manila slum-dweller would think his American counterpart blessed.Yet in the developed world, people with low-incomes are often trapped in substandard (an admittedly cultural definition) rental housing.

However, rental housing per se is not substandard: The upper income tenant can rent a luxurious home. But the lower-income tenant often discovers all the vagaries of the rental market: crowded apartments, landlords who do not want children as tenants, poor upkeep, high rents followed by doubledigit rent increases, dangerous neighborhoods. Moreover, with low vacancy rates, the tenant is in no position to argue with a landlord. In the United States, families with low incomes move to better places, better neighborhoods, when they move into their own homes.The Habitat owner's delight at living in a place where the heat, plumbing, electricity and appliances work is genuine.

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