Homeownership was propagandized as citizenship specifically to absorb political free time

Evidence

Homeownership, in the American popular imaginary, was defined as a “duty” for “good citizens” around 1945, after decades of governmental campaigns and programs. Propaganda for property defined homeownership as an act that would ground an individual as a member of a community, directly opposing homeownership with imaginary fears of socialistic, anarchistic, or communistic forms of collective ownership and the destruction of private property. This ideal of citizenship, however, was articulated in terms of time: the time to take care of a house or take care of a family would absorb the amount of time one has for other causes. In the words of Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek, “Owning a home … precisely meant being too busy to think or act politically—too much free time might lead to communism!” In midcentury America, homeownership became a central example of the formal subsumption of community by capital, a form of subsumption that persists today, in which the time required for the reproduction of capital absorbs all other possible uses of time, in which home and family become temporal barriers that prohibit resistance to, among other things, the economic domination of daily life. The desire to own a house is a desire shaded by the destruction of free, unallocated time that exists beyond productivity. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 147

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Weber’s Protestant work ethic and to contemporary critiques of the ‘hustle’ — the house as a device for time-discipline, echoing the book’s core thesis on how the self is structured as a firm. — connects to: Herbert Hoover made housing a national issue rooted in promoting homeownership — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 84; Hoover framed homeownership as morally disciplining citizens and ensuring social order — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 86
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to ‘Grafting & Growth: On Trees as Infrastructure’ — both track how an item of property (house/tree) gets recruited as a temporal and generative structure reshaping the lives entangled with it.