House Lust: America's Obsession With Our Homes

Product Description

A rich narrative that blends social commentary with incisive reporting, House Lust offers an astute, funny, and sometimes disturbing portrait of the behaviors that drove the greatest real estate boom in history—and its eventual bust.

Owning a home has long been considered the fulfillment of the American Dream. But in the last decade, as the real estate market boomed, Americans’ fascination with homes turned into a frenzy. Everywhere we turned, people were talking about, scheming over, envying, shopping for, refinancing, or just plain ogling houses—in the process, we’ve transformed shelter from a basic necessity into an all-consuming passion.

In House Lust, Newsweek’s Daniel McGinn travels the country to explore the roots of this mania. Even as the real estate boom has turned to bust, Americans remain obsessed with houses—many of us are still trading up, adding on, or doubling down to buy vacation property. But for others, this zeal for housing has carried a painful price, one that’s evident in the soaring foreclosure rates and mounting despair as millions of homeowners (and their lenders) realize they’ve stretched too far to buy the home of their dreams.

In a compelling narrative that takes us inside the homes—and psyches—of the House Lust–afflicted throughout the nation, McGinn examines the forces that turned housing into the talk of dinner parties. He explores the arms race for square footage and introduces readers to a menagerie of characters from the real estate world—from “renovation psychologists” who treat remodeling-addled clients to a guy who trades vacation time-shares the way kids trade baseball cards. McGinn also jumps into the fray himself by enrolling in real estate school and buying an investment property, sight unseen, over the Internet.

House Lust shows us just how contagious the ideal of owning the best home on the block can be. And as the real estate boom recedes into memory, McGinn offers cautionary tales to help us curb our lust when prices start rising again.

Product Details

Amazon Sales Rank: #37915 in Books
Published on: 2008-01-08
Released on: 2008-01-08
Original language: English
Number of items: 1
Binding: Hardcover
272 pages

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Despite the current downturn in the housing market, the country's mania for homes that exploded during the last half-decade is still alive and well, according to Newsweek writer McGinn. The fascination with homes—talking about, valuing, scheming over, envying, shopping for, refinancing, or just plain ogling homes—has continued even after the market has cooled, McGinn argues, and can be seen in the ongoing popularity of HGTV, the 24-7 real estate and home improvement cable channel and its flagship show, House Hunters. To prove his thesis, McGinn entertainingly explores the gamut of housing obsessions, from buying personally designed and oversized trophy homes, attempting large-scale renovations and spending obscene amounts of time on real estate Web sites such as Zillow and PropertyShark to actually going out and getting a real estate license, which McGinn himself does after only minimal training. It is this ability to get inside the actual lives of the housing-obsessed rather that relying purely on statistics to prove his point that makes this book as enjoyable as an episode of Flip This House, another popular housing reality show that McGinn cites in a book that is, at heart, all about behavior, not economics. (Dec. 26)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From AudioFile
Daniel McGinn reflects on America's obsession with real estate--building enormous new houses, fixing up old ones (although the author argues that in this "post-handy world" our hands are only useful for writing checks to contractors), watching HGTV, and nosily looking up the price of our friends' houses on zillow.com. The author invests in a rental property in Pocatello, Idaho, which doesn't work out so well. One tenant goes to jail, the other drinks on the porch with his homeless friends, and the property manager disappears with the rent money. David Drummond's well-modulated no-nonsense tone is a pleasure. His timing is impeccable, especially in delivering the author's frequent use of humor, and he consistently differentiates the narrative from the dialogue. A.B. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Review
Praise for HOUSE LUST
"House Lust remains relevant in spite of the bust because, by and large, people will never stop jonesing to keep up with the Joneses."--USA Today

"[House Lust] raises provocative questions that strike at the covetous soul of America’s culture and economy."--The New York Times

"[House Lust] is a witty survey of the world of buying, selling, and gossiping about homes."--The Wall Street Journal

"Daniel McGinn examines what drove history's greatest real estate boom with insightful, often amusing, anecdotes."--The New York Post

"To understand this overweening desire for residential improvement, McGinn takes a humorous journey across the country... it's obvious McGinn has done his homework." --The Seattle Times

"[House Lust] has been something of an instant hit."--The Worcester Telegram & Gazette

"McGinn writes like a social historian, albeit one with an impish curiosity and willingness to follow each thread to the end... House Lust is a good-humored and entertaining first book."--The Real Deal

"A highly-readable... snapshot album of 21st century American Life."--Kirkus

"It is [McGinn's] ability to get inside the actual lives of the housing-obsessed rather than relying purely on statistics to prove his point that makes this book as enjoyable as an episode of Flip This House."--Publishers Weekly

"After an odyssey that brought him in contact with every aspect of the housing boom, Daniel McGinn gives a deep sense of the spirit of our times--the Zeitgeist--and an understanding how this boom has led to our current economic problems."---ROBERT SHILLER, author, Irrational Exuberance

“The best part of this smart, entertaining book is that while you're laughing at other people's excesses, you're simultaneously calculating how much it would cost to do a renovation like theirs.”---JOEL STEIN, columnist, Time Magazine

“Hot properties, hypnotic home shows, and hysterical American homeowners – HOUSE LUST has it all. Daniel McGinn has written an insightful, comical read for the real estate junkie in all of us.”---ALEX McLEOD, original host, “Trading Spaces”

"A satisfying fix for anyone suffering from REAS--that's ‘Real Estate Addiction Syndrome,’ of course."---MICHAEL GROSS, author, 740 Park

"Every social gathering may end as a gabfest on real estate, but no one is as entertaining, informative, or knowledgeable about why we love our homes--and how the building industry makes use of our passions--as Daniel McGinn. HOUSE LUST is like a cocktail party without the hangover.”—STEVEN LEVY, author, The Perfect Thing

“It's Tracy Kidder-meets-Freakonomics as Daniel McGinn wryly explains our national obsession, profiling a cast of quirky characters along the way. HOUSE LUST is required reading in boom or bust."---ALISON ROGERS, author, Diary of a Real Estate Rookie

Monday, August 25, 2008