I need to read about property.

Specifically, I need to read philosophy of property. What does it mean when we say, or feel, that we own something? In the free software crowd, this is a perfectly normal thing to want to learn and does not make me any nerdier than I already am.

[This is in contrast to how people reacted to me at Thursday night's Tor.com meetup. To make it easier to make conversation, I wore a reusable whiteboard-ish nametag upon which I'd written my name, my Tor.com handle, and a bunch of topics I'm interested in: Le Guin, Battlestar, Stephenson, Trek, open source, feminism, stand-up comedy, and tax history. (Write on it with a Sharpie, erase with any sort of alcohol. I used perfume.) People invariably looked at it, nodded along, and then asked incredulously, "Tax history?" to which I responded, "That's what makes me a nerd here." Laughter & bonding achieved!]

I need to understand theory of property because I've been trying to understand my own feelings about ownership. For example, I have some inchoate thoughts on analogies among our property intuitions regarding homes, romantic and filial relationships, and intellectual property, especially regarding homesteading/squatter's rights/Lockean "mixing your labor with the land." But right now I want to talk about buying versus renting.

In personal terms, investing 300% of your wealth in one asset seems like dubious personal finance.

So why, in the US in the later twentieth century, did it make economic sense to buy a home to live in? Well, these days, the cost of rent or mortgage is now like half or more of income, on average. The government made interest on home mortgages tax-deductible, so it's like you don't have to pay taxes on the income that you used to pay that mortgage. And on a 30-year (standard) mortgage, interest is like 80 or 90% of the monthly payment.

But.

Sure, renting makes you feel like you're throwing away money every month instead of investing in your own wealth, and your rent goes into the pockets of the rentier class. But given the huge proportion of interest to principal in a mortgage payment, a mortage builds equity pretty slowly, and all that interest goes to the rentier class too. And it decreases the homeowner's mobility, of course, which hits knowledge workers especially hard. (I'm assuming that if you're reading this knowledge work is your lot.) Being able to move to a new city to command higher wages or consulting fees is an economic benefit too.

And house prices are not guaranteed to go up! Like Franklin Mint collectibles, they are not guaranteed to increase in value. And past performance really is no guarantee of future results. Buying a house is making a big, big bet.

But this is where we get to the intangible benefits of permanence, and all those other benefits of "owning" "your" "own" "home." (Heck, even our language is biased. We say "I just bought a house" or "she owns her home" as shorthand for "I just signed a mortgage and intend on owning this house outright eventually" or "she is slow-mo buying her home on the installment plan.")

If I own my house and live in it for a long time, it's a lot easier to raise kids, to run for office, to customize my living space, to feel neighborly, and so on. But what comes from what? What parts of those benefits are coming from choosing a city and staying there, from staying in one particular home, or from having a deed to a piece of land?

When I sleep overnight in my parents' house, or my sister's condo, what is that strange comfortable feeling I get? Do you get that feeling too?

So, just as I want to interrogate my emotional attachment to intellectual property, I want to make sense of my relationships with other forms of property. For example, I am used to living in a house that my family "owns". But what are other options? I could rent a house on a longish lease, to make that commitment that leads to the other benefits of long residency. I could buy a house with a mortgage of shorter duration so more of my money would go towards principal (and thus equity) rather than wasteful interest. I could join co-ops, communes, what have you.

The real shock, the one I have to overcome, is realizing that my reflexes when it comes to home ownership are based on certain historical contingencies about my childhood, the interest tax deduction for homeowners' mortgages, the existing financial and banking institutions, etc. I'm like the RIAA -- mistaking a common business model for What's Owed Me. But the universe does not owe me the deed to a piece of land and a four-bedroom two-bath. Nor does it owe me happy fleet-footed technomad ease in spatial (or social) mobility.

Buying a house to live in makes sense for some people. Will it ever make sense for me? I need to read about property.