Homeownership and Civic Engagement

There is a section in Bowling Alone on how homeowners are more involved civicly than renters. Barry Bluestone, Dean of the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, at Northeastern University, was speaking to the Harvard Kennedy School Inequality Program today on “Is Homeownership Now Just a Dream?” Among discussions of who benefits from homeownership, he discussed whether we should support it and raised the issue of whether homeowners are better citizens, and if so, is it just due to their longer tenure in neighborhoods. Excerpt from his draft paper:

“To test the assertions made in the literature, we conducted our own analysis using data collected through the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) fielded in 2001/2002….In our analysis of the NSFH data, it was possible to investigate the impact of homeownership on a range of factors including the respondent’s optimism about their own life circumstances; on church attendance; on getting together with neighbors; on participation in group recreational activities; on the time they spend in local sports, hobby and discussion groups; and in the number of times they participate in the activities of local service clubs, fraternal organizations and political groups….  Essentially, this [our] analysis asks the following question: if renters had the same income, age, education, and residential tenure as homeowners, would they be as optimistic about their own lives and be as civically-engaged as exisitng homeowners?  Again, is there any benefit to homeownership per se? The results of this new analysis point to a number of individual and social benefits that accrue to homeowners even when compared to renters who have lived in the same place for nearly ten years and have equivalent social-economic status (SES) – income, education, and age.   On the one hand, the analysis finds no difference between homeowners and renters in church attendance, in getting together with friends, or in participating in group recreational activities.  On the other, homeowners tend to be more optimistic about their own futures, they participate more often in local sports and discussion groups, and most importantly they are more civically engaged in service organizations, fraternal groups, and political organizations… Before controlling for housing tenure and SES, 48.3% of homeowners report that they participated in sports, hobby, or discussion groups at least once a year; only 37.9% of renters reported such.  After controlling for these factors, the probability of renters participating in these activities increases to 39.8%.  Hence, homeownership per se appears to boost such participation by 8.5 percentage points or by more than 21 percent. Before controlling for housing tensure and SES, 37.5% of homeowners but only 27.2% of renters responded that they participated at least once a year in service clubs, fraternal organizations, or political groups.  After controlling for tenure and SES, renter participation appears to increase to 31.5%, still 6 percentage points less than homeowners.  That is, homeowners are 19 percent more likely to be active in these groups.

Bluestone seems sympathetic to homeownership.  His analysis is interesting but despite his effort to be “fair”, he likely overcontrols since he makes the highly unlikely assumption that one could have considerable number of renters with the same tenure as homeowners. One thing that Bluestone didn’t examine is how renters and buyers differ in their future intentions of rootedness and geographic mobility: only 25% of homeowners, when we conducted research for Bowling Alone, expected to move in the next five years versus two-thirds of renters.  If we had policies in America that left us with far more renters, it seems wishful thinking to imagine that most of them would remain in community for as long as the owners. And thus even on the measures where Bluestone doesn’t find that homeownership is associated with higher levels of engagement after his demographic controls (namely, socializing and  church attendance), homownership probably really is still associated with higher socializing and church attendance.  Homeownership works to increase rootedness (partly psychologically and partly financially) and this rootedness increases socializing and church attendance.

Bluestone also relayed an interesting and telling anecdote  about his hometown of Detroit.  Albert Cobo (Mayor of Detroit in the early 1950s) used the power of eminent domain to raze a poor community in downtown Detroit to prepare for highway expansion that never occurred.  After the highway fell through, African-Americans’ hopes that the razed area would soon be rebuilt,  the suburbs of Detroit were developed, but the area razed by Cobo remained vacant.  Eventually the UAW developed a significant tract of housing in the razed area but insisted that all the homes be rental units.  Edison developed a community across the street, even hiring the same architect to give the other community the same look and feel.  Bluestone notes that while these areas (the UAW rental tract and the Edison ownership tract) attracted similar residents, the Edison (home-owned) units have remained in much better condition as the owners have worked to preserve their investments and volunteered for neighborhood groups that preserved the more general environment.  My guess, although Bluestone didn’t say this, is that residential tenure was also much longer in the Edison ownership tract than in the UAW rental one.

The connection between religiosity and wellbeing

Our colleague, Chaeyoon Lim, wrote a summary of his research findings on the connection between religiosity and wellbeing using the amazing Gallup- Healthways data (that has surveyed 1,000 people a day for several years).

Excerpt: “Americans who attend a church, synagogue, or mosque frequently report experiencing more positive emotions and fewer negative ones in general than do those who attend less often or not at all. Frequent churchgoers experience an average of 3.36 positive emotions per day compared with an average of 3.08 among those who never attend. This relationship holds true even when controlling for key demographic variables like age, education, and income.”

Not included in Chaeyoon’s published comments, he also found that, even controlling for other factors like age, gender, race, and the like, Americans would have either had to increase their income by $90,000 a year or gain a college education to have the same increase in life satisfaction as they get from weekly church attendance.”

If you click on the below graph, you can see that all religions and even respondents with no religion frequently reported higher life satisfaction  as they went to church more often (controlling for all the standard factors like age, region, gender, income, education, etc.).  You may ask how those with no religion attended “church” frequently;  most typically in our Faith Matters surveys it was when a religious spouse got their non-religious spouse to accompany them.

Chaeyoon’s work also shows that while all Americans are happier on the weekend, secular Americans experience a drop from Saturday to Sunday in their happiness;  religious Americans are happier every day from Monday through Saturday and then their happiness, rather than declining on Sunday, goes up even higher than Saturday.

Read “In U.S., Churchgoers Boast Better Mood, Especially on Sundays: Those who don’t attend religious services often see their mood decline” (by Chaeyoon Lim)

For other work on the connection between happiness, life satisfaction and religiosity, see American Grace (end of Chapter 12) and “Religion, Social Networks, and Life Satisfaction” by Chaeyoon Lim and Robert Putnam, American Sociological Review 2010, Vol. 75(6): 914–93.

The school for social capital?

The New American Academy, serving poor non-white  youth in Crown Heights, Brooklyn aims to reinvent education, but it may well be a strong contender for  building social capital as well.

Joel Klein, Former Chancellor,New York City Department of Education has written:

“The New American Academy [NAA] is an innovative, potentially very powerful way to provide education to children. It is both brilliant and scalable and holds out the hope of changing K-12 education in major ways.

This is a big idea, something we desperately need if we are going to significantly change the educational outcomes for our children.”

Educationally, NAA started in 2010 as a public school with kindergarten and first graders.  Each year they will add another grade until they reach fifth grade.  They assign 4 teachers to 60 students who they remain with from grades K-5. The teachers are compensated and promoted based on performance their 60-student flock as well as on peer and supervisory review.  OneMaster teacher (paid $120,000 annually) helps supervise the overall direction among 3 less senior teachers who rotate among 3-4 tables.

The school was founded by a  Shimon Waronker, “who grew up speaking Spanish in South America, became a U.S. Army intelligence officer, became an increasingly observant Jew, studied at yeshiva, joined the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, became a public schoolteacher and then studied at the New York City Leadership Academy, which Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the former New York Schools chancellor, Joel Klein, founded to train promising school principal candidates.” While a doctoral student in Harvard’s Urban Superintendents Program, he conceived the NAA educational approach based on the elite Phillips Exeter Academy and in 2009 won Harvardʼs Phi Delta Kappa Award for Innovation in Education.

Waronker, a Hasidic Jew, who sports a long bears and wears a black  suit,  black hat and a velvet kippa, seems an improbable leader for a non-white inner city school.  But he gained credibility after reviving the failing extremely violent Jordan Mott School  in the depressed South Bronx and overcoming parental wariness ultimately to gain the trust of parents and students.

In principle, the school seems unusually well-designed to promote social capital building among the students and teachers.  There is a high mix of teamwork, the students get a lot of practice in honing civic skills (like making presentations) and sit around larger tables participating in teacher-led group discussions.

“The teachers are not solitary. They are constantly interacting as an ensemble. Students can see them working together and learning from each other. The students are controlled less by uniform rules than by the constant informal nudges from the teachers all around.” [David Brooks]

“He has a grand theory to transform American education…. The American education model, he says, was actually copied from the 18th-century Prussian model designed to create docile subjects and factory workers. He wants schools to operate more like the networked collaborative world of today.” [Brooks]

Brooks says NAA “does a tremendous job of nurturing relationships. Since people learn from people they love, education is fundamentally about the relationship between a teacher and student. By insisting on constant informal contact and by preserving that contact year after year, The New American Academy has the potential to create richer, mentorlike or even familylike relationships for students who are not rich in those things.”

The school is important for at least two reasons.  Much social capital research and socialization research demonstrates that “as the twig is bent, so grows the tree”.  These early years are a critical time to teach the soft non-cognitive skills that are increasingly valuable in today’s society like teamwork, building relationships, negotiating differences, etc.  So this early experience in building social capital, if successful, could be an important model.

Second, we are increasingly discovering in our own research that working class kids (white and non-white) are increasingly falling through society’s cracks and are falling further and further behind their counterparts from more affluent and educated backgrounds.  While it is still to be proven, NAA seems to offer promise for what schools could do to start to close these gaps among kids who happened to be born on the wrong side of the tracks.

I look forward to the research that compares the educational and social outcomes of kids attending NAA against their matched counterparts who don’t.

Read David Brooks’ “The Relationship School” in the NYT (3/23/12)

Read “60 First Graders, 4 Teachers, One Loud Way to Learn” (NYT, 1/11/2011) [Slide show here.]