So I read in Newsweek an editorial by Jacob Weisberg, entitled "What else are we wrong about?" The observation that caught my eye: "Homeownership encourages longer commutes. And at least one study says it makes you fat and unhappy."
I've had less-than-glowing sociological intuitions about America's homeownership-as-secular-religion for some time. And the recent subprime mortgage crisis points up some of the instabilities, although it mostly seems the blame lies with exploitative financiers. The point is, a homeownership "religion" can can be exploitative. At the least, it becomes a form of social control: keep your citizens in sufficient debt that they can't challenge the underpinnings of the economic system.
But as I reflected on the homeownership question, this morning, I had a curious new insight. One of the sociological factors that seems to drive US homeownership trends is the "problem of public education." Which is to say, families in search of "better schools" search out "good school districts" which are inevitably "farther out" – leading to overleveraged mortgages and longer commutes, etc., etc. Look at the recent immense movement of lower-middle-class and working-class hispanics into California's Inland Empire, to get away from the "city problems" and "city schools," among other things.
All of which means that, at least indirectly, the US "public education problem" could be viewed as a root cause (I said a root cause, not the root cause) of things as diverse as the current global financial crisis (via the subprime mortgage problem) and global warming (via the excessively long, automobile-dependent commuting pattern of American workers).
Maybe that's just my biases at work. I really believe that the single thing that needs to be "fixed" about the American polity is the education system.