Real estate ownership has become definition of American Dream
When a press release from a frustrated young woman threatening to sue the real estate industry “for the sake of her generation” if she couldn’t get a mortgage found its way into my inbox, I was intrigued.
Despite the dubious premise of her threats, Carolyn Houck, an upstart developer of utopian communities, nonetheless represents feelings about real estate, its professionals and the sense of the younger landless generation being cheated by the landed Boomers that were not new to me. Describing herself as “hopping mad” about business as usual in the industry, Houck said she’s ready to take her case to court.
“I’m a statistic,” Houck told me when reached in her home in Sonoma County. “When you have unstable living environments, you have fundamental stress – that causes you to not be able to be effective in the world. All these future-thinking young people are spending all their time on housing, and I don’t think the older generation has any idea what we’re experiencing.”