The New York Times writes about men who jump the picket fence, including Minneapolis-based playwright Alan Berks. The premise seems to be that male disaffection with home ownership is on the rise.
Married couples make up the largest group of new home buyers. Next, according to research from the National Association of Realtors, are single women, who in the last 12 months represented 21 percent of home buyers; single men were just 10 percent. That gap has opened up in the last decade, said Paul Bishop, vice president for research at the association.
Mr. Bishop’s survey is silent on the motivation behind the gender split. Younger single men may be more likely to change jobs and cities, he speculates. They may be more willing to squeeze into an apartment with two or three buddies. Or they may be cowering in the nest with Mom and Dad.
Whatever the case, a number of men seem to be newly aware of what economists describe as a peculiarity of homeownership: it has an asset value (as an abstract investment) and a consumption value (as a place to watch VH1 and wash underwear).
Beyond the married artist Berks, whose disaffection made his spouse disaffected, too, the story goes on to cite a divorced man, a single gay man, a relative newlywed with a small child and a medical fellow married to an ob/gyn resident.
The real "trend" seemed pretty clear to me. Home ownership doesn't work too well without a woman willing or able to take on a share of the workload — or all of it.
