It’s a Dutch Door Life
I just saw a piece from the Atlantic that caught my eye. It is called The HGTV-ification of America and it’s opening salvo is “You can’t escape gray floors”. As I read that, I looked down at the gray luxury vinyl floors under my feet in our office. We had originally put in two shades of gray (not quite the fifty that pop culture demanded) when we renovated our kitchen in 2017. While we were at it, we decided to ditch the living room and dining room carpeting in favor of extending the gray luxury vinyl to those areas, putting the majority of living areas of the house into the modern HGTV era. Then, somewhere along the line of the ensuing several years, we opted to have the same stuff put into the office, and then the guest rooms and eventually the master bedroom. I was the holdout on the master bedroom changeover because I have always felt that carpeting belonged in the bedroom. The problem was that between dog pee and vomit, it became less and less practical to buy out the folic acid shelf at the pet store and still suffer with slightly off-color carpeting, so we went piecemeal into that quiet night of all gray luxury vinyl flooring. The truth is, we liked the way it looked and we especially appreciated the way it kept clean.. The fact that everybody in the modern world was using the same stuff on their floors was no more than a minor niggle in the back of our minds. We don’t need no stinkin’ approval from anyone for how we choose to live in our own home, right?
And HGTV remains our go-to sedative for late evening, pre-bedtime viewing. Now that we do all our TV watching via Hulu streaming (what has become of us with no rabbit ears, no cable TV, no monster satellite dish, no mini satellite dish, no Dish dish, and now just ubiquitous WiFi Mesh?), we get served up a menu of perhaps ten different HGTV show options that all revolve around the same theme. That theme is a version of watching how other people choose to make their home purchase or rental decisions, how they decide to renovate those homes, how they hope to buy and flip their homes and even how they choose to love it or list it. I think we can call this the Baskin-Robbins of the original Bob Vila This Old House programming. Do you remember Bob Vila? Now that was a quality show where you actually felt like you learned something about house renovations. That is as opposed to now where you learn that some people think paint color is more important to choosing a home than property location, location, location. Now everyone wants stainless steel appliances, granite, or more likely quartz countertops, shaker cabinets in muted dark blue or maple gray and lots and lots of subway tile of all sizes and every color of grout known to man for the backsplash, and that’s just the kitchen. By the way, there isn’t a wall that has ever been erected by man that cannot be removed to create an open-flow living concept so that no cook ever needs to feel they are doing a chore rather than socializing with their family and guests. And, by the way, if that wall is load-bearing, just take it out and put in a new header beam and shut the fuck up (no whining allowed while renovating or flipping).
The personal life improvement aspects of HGTV has also morphed somewhat into a flipping regimen. Why should people work for a living anymore when they can live off their residential real estate? There is a certain circularity to it all. When I go into a community I have never visited, I always wonder why it is there. In the post-war period it was there either because it was near the farms or it was near enough to the urban centers to allow suburbanites to commute to work. We all knew that some people needed to provide local support services for the community wherever you were. Whether it was the general store in a one-horse town or the strip mall off the commuter artery, local people needed some number of service people to provide them with the things that made life comfortable. Some of those people even got rich doing it, most notably the local car dealers in a country that was dying to hit the road with as many vehicles per household as they could park in and around their homes. But real estate brokerage was more the domain of the people who chose to drop out of whatever it was they started to do and found distasteful or too challenging. How hard is it to sell houses in a country where we wanted every pot to have a chicken and every young couple to have a home of their own?
After WWII, homeownership in America stood at about 50% and the American Dream had almost 85% of people thinking that they really needed to own their own home. So, we collectively got American homeownership up over 60% in the 60’s and gradually pushed it up to 66% in 1980. It languished for the better part of two decades, but then the commercial forces of Main Street, the Beltway and Wall Street conspired to broaden access to homeownership with fancy financial engineering and government-supported mortgage markets and we peaked at almost 70%. We seem destined to live between 65-70% with the unencumbered representing the marginalized part of the population (which I guess now includes Elon Musk) that can’t make financial sense or discipline out of owning their own home. To put this into context and to once and for all debunk the notion of the American Dream, the United States ranks 50th on the list of 70 countries for which homeownership statistics are readily available. The higher countries on the list like Romania, Cuba, Hungary and Vietnam are in the 90% or higher category. The list really bottoms out at about 50% although Fiji has the audacity to post a score of 10% for some reason and holds down the bottom rung on the ladder.
When Americans think about these statistics, and what happened with the subprime crisis fifteen years ago, we tend to think that we got over-exuberant in trying to let immigrants own a piece of the pie. The truth is that Mexico, our national favorite immigration source (even though of late, Asia has been the biggest numerical source of U.S. immigrants) has a homeownership rate of 80%. Now, we can all debate whether these high percentage homeownership countries all provide their inhabitants with gray luxury vinyl flooring, but if you switch to the HGTV channel that covers international house hunting and renovation, you are likely to find that that gray vinyl is quickly creeping out around the entire world. Don’t be surprised if you travel to some remote area on the Silk Road and find that the Stan you are in has plenty of gray luxury vinyl flooring already installed.
But now we have a new, Americanized phenomenon that originated in the old country (both the Netherlands and Ireland mostly) and that is what we call the Dutch Door or Half Door. It was a decidedly rural invention for the purpose of keeping kids of both the human and goat kind indoors while allowing a breeze of fresh air to come into the kitchen. We know it as the place where Lassie’s mom left the apple pie to cool or where Mr. Ed stuck his head out of the stable to speak to Wilbur. But now on HGTV, someone is installing a Dutch Door at great cost on every episode. Least you think that’s just TV, Handy Brad tells me he has installed three of them in Champagne Village alone this year. And they ain’t cheap, costing up to $3,000 just to keep up with HGTV trends. That’s more than it costs to install a header (except in Waco, Texas). Air conditioning and Global Climate Change be damned, I want my slice of American/Dutch pie. Keep watching HGTV to be sure you keep up with the Jones’ on the next renovation trend.