Home Economics on TV

5 minute read
James Poniewozik

If you watch CNBC, you know that these are not happy times for American homeowners. U.S. home prices just fell for the first time in 16 years, new condos are languishing in former hot spots like Florida, and the subprime-lending fiasco threatens to drag down the wider economy.

But why listen to CNBC? Turn the dial a few notches to HGTV, and the housing boom has never been boomier. HGTV, the homespun redoubt of gardening and glue-gun projects that became a cable hit in the post-9/11 cocooning era, is now dominated by what it calls “Property Buzz” shows: series about buying and selling homes, which now make up six of the channel’s 10 highest-rated shows. Shows like Secrets That Sell!, Designed to Sell, Bought & Sold, Get It Sold–notice a pattern?–offer a guide to tapping, Jed Clampett–style, the gusher of wealth sitting under your property. “What will people do to sell?” asks the intro of Buy Me. “How far will buyers go?”

Like CNBC, HGTV is a creature of a certain economic heyday (the early aughts housing boom, as opposed to the late-’90s NASDAQ bubble) that has had to adjust to tough times, in this case by offering escapism that turns head-on into the very thing people want to escape from. (Just as, after 9/11, terrorism became all the rage in pop culture.)

“Even a couple years ago, we got the sense that the market was becoming iffy for people,” says HGTV senior vice president of programming Michael Dingley. “In times that are iffy, the stakes are very high, financially and emotionally, in buying and selling a home.” The shows play on homeowners’ nightmares–Will we get any offers? What if we have to carry two mortgages?–but there’s usually a happy ending: the house is sold, the asking price met or exceeded. (Mind you, “happy” is relative. For a first-time buyer, low prices are good news. But more than 84% of HGTV viewers are homeowners, compared with roughly 68% of all Americans.)

The most mercenary, and irresistible, “Property Buzz” show is My House Is Worth What?, which is exactly what it sounds like. Homeowners anxious to cash in have their houses appraised, Antiques Roadshow–style. Features and renovations that add value–water views, granite counters–get a ka-ching! sound effect. (The premise is friendly to advertisers like Lowe’s and Home Depot, since it helps viewers rationalize that spa bathroom as an “investment.”) Minuses knock dollars off, especially anything that reflects the owner’s individuality. “Your taste is very specific” is a death sentence on this show.

It all leads to the payoff, when an agent tells the breathless owners, “I would list your house for …” It may not be realistic (how certain can an appraiser be that a half-bath is worth exactly $20,000?). But it’s brilliant TV, allowing us to indulge a little jealousy (say, of the lucky bastard who bought a Manhattan apartment for $90,000 in 1990) and vicarious money lust. And it demonstrates how the housing boom changed the way people look at their homes: as an expression of their financial savvy rather than their creative selves.

And who can blame us for it? Social Security is endangered. Job security is a quaint memory. Upward social mobility is failing. (A new study by the Economic Mobility Project finds that American men in their 30s are worse off financially than their fathers.) Real estate may not offer double-digit returns anymore, but it does offer an atavistic promise of security, a nest egg embodied in Sheetrock that you can touch and dirt that can’t be outsourced to Mumbai. Property fever is in our blood: this country made its fortune in sweet real estate deals–a Louisiana Purchase here, a few trinkets for Manhattan there–and these HGTV shows tap into something primal.

They’re not alone: Bravo, A&E, TLC and other channels have real-estate-oriented series, while HBO debuts the real estate satire 12 Miles of Bad Road next year. In FX’s drama The Riches–about a con artist who moves to a gated community and passes himself off as a real estate lawyer–the buying and selling of land comes to stand for American dreams, appetites and origins. Creator Dmitry Lipkin says the pilot was shot in an exurb 40 minutes from New Orleans. “Everything around it was swampland,” he recalls, “and in the middle of it was this very orderly chunk of land carved out for development.” The setting, he says, captured the “quintessentially American” situation of building wealth out of nothing, imposing civilized façades on wilderness. One character gets her arm eaten by an alligator that emerges from the swamp.

That’s homeownership in a nutshell: the dream of wealth, self-reinvention and security, combined with the faintest fear that something in your backyard may just come back to bite you. Welcome home, America.

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