In the real estate craze, you are where you live

Unfortunate publishing dates have doomed more than a few books. A friend of a friend’s novel was published on Sept. 11, 2001, so few people had the time or inclination to pay attention to a new novel.

One might worry that “House Lust,” a new book on our obsession with real estate, might suffer a similar fate as foreclosures soar to historic levels, mortgage lenders go out of business and home prices drop like lead.

But author Daniel McGinn isn’t worried. Americans are as crazy as ever for their real estate, he contends, and will remain obsessed with what their homes are worth, how many square feet they encompass, how they’re decorated and where and how to buy more property, even as the market falls. The real estate craze is more than a fad, he asserts, arguing that the behaviors we learned from the housing boom have become a way of life, resulting in a permanent shift of thinking “that will leave many of us happily obsessed with houses for years to come.”

The Newsweek reporter details the factors responsible for this shift. There’s the “High Five Effect,” in which homeowners celebrate the new heights of value their homes reach. Second, many Americans are no longer saving for retirement, betting instead that their houses will continue to appreciate and see them through. Americans, he notes, used to play the stock market, but “now we play our homes.”

Homeowners also began refinancing every few years, taking out equity and operating like “mini-CFO[s], deciding just how much of their wealth to keep in their home” and how much to spend or invest elsewhere. And the Internet makes it easy to “peek in the window” of others’ homes, accessing hard data about values, fueling fiendish real estate envy. Finally, he writes, status judgments are based less on people’s professions than on the neighborhoods and addresses where they live.

Along the way, real estate-oriented television programs have burgeoned and become their own entertainment industry, stoking a remodeling fever among Americans craving bigger, better and fancier homes.

More than half the book deals with real estate as an investment or a business, and it is in these chapters that McGinn’s attempts to become an active participant in the narrative become distressingly transparent. At a “Buy Real Estate Now!” type of seminar, he notices that would-be investors are directed to buy in the exact same part of Pocatello, Idaho. (Even the author buys there.) He looks at people who want to make it big by becoming real estate agents, sitting through agonizingly tedious real estate classes (with the reader in tow) so that he can get his own license -- although he apparently has no plan to use it. McGinn also explores the realms of vacation homes and time shares, staying at various time shares but it’s clear that he’s really not in the market.

It is this sense of authorial distance, this checking it out, that makes “House Lust” such a disappointing read. For a book ostensibly about passion, it is fundamentally a cold fish. The author claims to be suffering from a hefty dose of the very lust he’s writing about: “In keeping with Biblical admonitions, I do not covet my neighbor’s wife. But if coveting a ‘5BR, 3.5BA immac Col, gran/cherry kit, lg. MBR on priv 2 acres’ is a sin, I’m afraid I’ve got some explaining to do,” he writes. But beyond that “I’m in the club” assertion, there’s no sense of fervor, no mark of true obsession, no sign that he has anything at stake. The writing is snappy, what you’d expect in a magazine article, but it lacks the heft to sustain a book-length narrative.

Meaty questions lurking beneath McGinn’s celebration of house lust, alas, are never really addressed: How does he think the mortgage crisis will pan out? Has Americans’ greed and desire for bigger and more cast us in an unattractive light?

For readers who have not been inflamed by house lust (or whose negative experiences with real estate may have extinguished the flames), this book will not ignite that passion. For those already afire, logging on to Realtor.com will give the same fix without shelling out $24.95.

Bernadette Murphy is author of “Zen and the Art of Knitting” and co-author of “The Tao Gals’ Guide to Real Estate.”