Recessions, job wages and new family creation timelines are all changing expectations for housing. This Curbed article details some of the more recent history, the different triggers, impacts and some of the future implications of how the next generation of potential buyers are reconsidering their options.
The story starts with a gothic mansion, all stone turrets and peaked windows, a fortress-like structure. The camera descends from a dark swirling sky to a full moon to finally frame the mansion. A male voice narrates Shirley Jackson’s famous opening lines from her 1959 gothic novel, The Haunting of Hill House: “Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut,” he reads. We are told, from the moment we start the show, that this is a story about a house. And we are told that, while the house is sinister, it does have good bones.
As the seconds pass, we move indoors. Children sit awake in their beds, children wander the halls, and a father in respectable blue pajamas comes to comfort his crying, ghost-touched daughter. “How long do we have to live here, Daddy?” she asks. “Well, your mother and I have to finish fixing this house, and then someone has to buy it,” he replies. “Then we can go?” she asks. Then, he says, they can go.
The 2018 Netflix recreation of The Haunting of Hill House isn’t just a reinterpretation of Jackson’s novel; it’s also part of a long tradition of American homeownership horror stories. These stories begin with a place. The place is bad, uncanny in a Freudian sense (the Austrian psychoanalyst’s word for the uncanny was unheimlich, which literally translates to un-home-like), but the place is also beautiful. In Rosemary’s Baby, American Horror Story, Dream House, Sinister, a lovely old structure, built with care and architectural flourishes—not to mention good bones—turns out to be a living nightmare. Often, the movie centers around a young couple or a young family. They quickly become trapped. The price was a trick. People don’t own the house. The house owns them. Like mold, it gets inside the unwitting buyers. It seeps into their lungs, their dreams, their bodies and minds, permeating everything.
There are two different tales we tell ourselves about houses. The primary story is not about ghosts or demons or red rooms or ghouls, but rather about bright futures, long lives, children, grandchildren, and hard-earned success. The second story, the darker story, is about the horror of being trapped. Throughout American history, these stories have existed side by side. For people with the resources to buy in, one once felt more “real” than the other, but as we learned after the real estate crash of 2008, there’s truth to be found in both of them, especially for members of the cash-poor, dream-rich millennial generation.
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