The housing market is a difficult thing in the United States. It can often seem flighty and, in many instances, it actually is. It’s certainly hard to pin down and no one can ever seem to predict what it’s going to do next. Because of its precariousness, you’ll find a lot of people who are afraid to interact with it or anything to do with buying houses at all. It can just seem like too big of a risk for anyone to take with their hard earned money. While this is true for some, it’s not exactly true for others. All it takes is a bit of research and discussion for the average person to understand that the history of the housing market is cyclical. Like many other processes in this world, it tends to go around and come around in certain patterns that you can spot with enough knowledge. The housing market isn’t just about new homes or buying a new home or the houses for sale within it. It’s about the history of the growing population of the United States and the different things they’ve looked for at different times. Let’s go back for a second to the very beginning of the United States, then, and see how and why the housing market in the United States has developed in the way that it has.
The start of the industrial revolution
By the time the country was fully formed in the late seventeen hundreds, there was already a clouded sense of where and how people could live. This is primarily because the beginning of our country, for all its victories and flaws, was caught in between the end of one era of human history and the beginning of another. While most people in the United States were primarily farmers and agricultural workers at the start of the country, they were soon to leave that life as a collective and migrate to the growing factories. It would take a couple decades, of course, but when it started it would never fully end. Until the 1960’s and 70’s at least. This migration was the very start of the Industrial Revolution which had begun in Britain in the previous two decades preceding 1800 and was soon to sweep across the entire world. By the end of the century, the face of every nation on earth would be completely unrecognizable, as they would collectively be during the start of the century after that in the 2000’s. But what does any of this have to do with new homes or luxury real estate?
New homes for the new lives of the American people
People moving to these new factories needed new homes, of course. They couldn’t quite live the way that people had before, in small villages where people worked the land. What’s interesting about this is that, before this period in history, small villages were all people had lived within. In a very real sense, this was a change that history had never seen before. Whole industrial towns grew slowly up around these factories, towns with their own history and cultures that were matched by no other towns in the nation or the world at large. These factory towns became a staple of American life, and in a very fundamental way, American culture by the start of 1900.
Finding ways forward
New homes don’t spring up around factories anymore. That much is obvious. So what happened to these places that Americans had lived in for one hundred and fifty years? Well, the sixties and seventies happened. To put it in a short way. The growth actually continued for the first half of the twentieth century, with both world wars contributing in major ways. But, once automation and smarter machines began to develop, people spread out into suburbs and away from centralized homes. The new home boom had faded and, with it, the face of American culture had changed again. How will it change again as we get deeper into the decades of the twenty first century? No one is quite sure but, as we go forward, we will definitely find out.
