Hoover framed homeownership as morally disciplining citizens and ensuring social order

Evidence

To Hoover, the large number of renters was intolerable. “Maintaining a high percentage of individual home owners is one of the searching tests that now challenge the people of the United States,” he wrote in 1923. The discipline of ownership was critical to social order. “The home owner has a constructive aim in life,” Hoover explained. “He works harder outside his home; he spends his leisure more profitably, and he and his family live a finer life and enjoy more of the comforts and cultivating influences of our modern civilization. A husband and wife who own their own home are more apt to save. They have an interest in the advancement of a social system that permits the individual to store up the fruits of his labor. As direct taxpayers they take a more active part in local government. Above all, the love of home is one of the finest instincts and the greatest of inspirations of our people.” — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 86

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the property-rights and homeowner ideology arguments building in this book’s later chapters (ch. 8) — ownership as the anchor of political participation cuts to the heart of why sprawl’s land-use politics formed. — connects to: Herbert Hoover made housing a national issue rooted in promoting homeownership — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 84; Homeownership was propagandized as citizenship specifically to absorb political free time — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist…, 147; Family household was reframed as a site of political discipline (+1 more)
• SEED: Potential essay angle: the ideology that ownership makes ‘better citizens’ reversed a generation later when the same owners fought environmental regulation — ownership as entitlement to externalize costs.

Broader Connections

• Homeownership was propagandized as citizenship specifically to absorb political free time #complicates (0.85) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 147
• Family household was reframed as a site of political discipline #exemplifies (0.82)
• Desegregation pressure forced segregationists to reinvent themselves as respectable homeowners #complicates (0.78) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 106