Abstract
This paper presents a brief history of the use of happiness and wellbeing rhetoric to bolster political support for the expansion of homeownership in the United States. Recent research has studied the impact of homeownership on various dimensions of wellbeing, such as crime, education, health, and civic participation. However, less attention has been given to the way in which policymakers have historically defined the pursuit of happiness as a gateway to a virtuous way of life thanks to homeownership. After exploring the relations between the right to pursue happiness and the right to own property in the American founding documents, the paper studies the happiness discourse that accompanied the rise of the suburban model of homeownership in the 20th century, followed by that which accompanied the policy shifts implemented in the late 20th century to conserve this model.
Highlights
Happiness as a Virtuous Way of Life10 Blackstone embodied the Enlightenment belief that the world is governed by natural laws that humans can know, discover, and live with in harmony
Life, Liberty, and a House in the Suburbs
Communism never gained as much traction in the United States as it had in Europe, American political and economic elites of the early 20th century had an interest in staving off the rise of a potentially revolutionary urban proletariat by renewing the pursuit of happiness through new forms of property ownership
Summary
10 Blackstone embodied the Enlightenment belief that the world is governed by natural laws that humans can know, discover, and live with in harmony. 20 the rhetoric of property and virtue should not blind us to the political and economic interests that the Founding Fathers had in associating the pursuit of happiness with property ownership. 21 taken together, early American political discourse and the nation’s founding documents appear to have institutionalized a strong connection between the pursuit of happiness, general welfare, property rights, and a virtuous way of life—though not a direct equivalency. The role of government is to provide a framework to expand access to an ownership lifestyle This role initially served the interests of white male property owners, but the discourse of universal rights in the founding documents provides an institutionalized discursive model to accompany any political action aimed at reducing the gap between dream and reality for excluded populations.
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