A Closer Look At The American Dream Of Homeownership

"In Europe during the age of exploration, a wealthy man's home might indeed be a castle. But if a castle wasn't in the offing--whether because the man was a younger son who wasn't going to inherit one, or because the man simply lacked the resources for a place to call his own--there was always America."

"...The nation that became the U.S. was always notable for the degree to which home ownership was widely distributed across the population. Chronically short of cash, the young national government was rich in land, which it sold cheaply, even gave away, in the hope its citizens would found homesteads.

Kenneth Jackson of Columbia University, perhaps the pre-eminent social historian of home ownership in the U.S., notes that other nations like Russia, Australia and Canada had comparably large territory, but much of their land consisted of deserts or tundra. "In comparison with other countries of the world, the real estate of North America was almost literally endless," he observed in his now-classic Crabgrass Frontier."