14 AMERICAN BLUES THEATER IS OWNING A HOME STILL ESSENTIAL TO THE AMERICAN DREAM? In It’s a Wonderful Life: Live in Chicago!, the Bailey Building & Loan makes the dream of homeownership a reality for many residents of Bedford Falls, but is homeownership still essential to the American Dream today? The below Chicago Tribune article by Nicholas Padiak— edited here for length—addresses that very question. Ah, the American Dream: You work hard, get a good job, start a family, buy a house and then, when you're done with that house, you buy a bigger one. You accumulate wealth in your home and then pass that wealth on to your children, who will be better off than you. That's the American Dream, right? Right? "I guess if your definition of the American Dream hasn't changed since, like, the '50s," said freelance camera operator Dan Niederkorn, 24, of the Chicago suburb of Montgomery. Niederkorn, a member of the millennial generation, currently lives with his parents but said he plans to be a renter for life and never buy a home. He craves the ability to pack up and go, he said, and doesn’t want to be saddled with a home loan, property taxes or homeowners associations fees. And though this may put him in the minority—an Apartment List survey of about 24,000 renters nationwide released in May found that 80% of millennial renters want to buy a house or condo sometime in the future—it does raise some interesting questions about the American Dream and the place of homeownership within it. History of homeownership To really examine what we know of as the American Dream, it helps to start by looking at the history of homeownership in the United States. "The U.S. wasn't always a nation of homeowners," said Brian McCabe, assistant sociology professor at Georgetown University and author of the book No Place Like Home: Wealth, Community, and the Politics of Homeownership. "The homeownership rate really starts to climb after the Second World War," McCabe said. "So it's in the 1950s and the 1960s that we go from being a country of 45% (homeownership) to a country of well over 60%." There are many reasons for this shift, McCabe said, citing the rise of the suburbs, the postwar baby boom, low interest rates offered to soldiers returning from the war and the evolution of mortgages into the relatively low-down- payment, extended-loan-period products we commonly see today. "This is really the creation of the federal government," McCabe said. "We thought what it meant to be a good citizen was very caught up in what it meant to own property in the United States." Of course, as with most things political, the government didn't act entirely on its own, according to Eugene White, professor of economics at Rutgers University and co-editor of the book Housing and Mortgage Markets in Historical Perspective. "As we know, in taxes or anything else, there's a great deal of lobbying which goes on in Congress," White said. "And the housing industry has been very successful in getting breaks ... which induce people to buy houses." The breaks White referred to are some of the biggest incentives toward homeownership today, according to Greg Nagel, managing broker of Ask Nagel Realty in Chicago's West Town community area. Homeownership, said Nagel, "represents probably the most risk-free investment opportunity to build wealth due to the tax advantages," such as the mortgage interest and property tax deductions. "It's very powerful," he said. Effects of crisis deeply felt But as was made painfully clear during the housing crisis of 2007-08, real estate investments aren't always a sure thing. And this knowledge may loom large for an entire generation of Americans. "A lot of millennials' conceptions about homeownership are shaped by the experiences they went through during their formative years," said Phoenix-based attorney James Goodnow, shareholder and director at Fennemore Craig P.C. and co-author of the book Motivating Millennials. "When the housing bubble burst in 2008, millennials saw