Upcoming

Why Are We Obsessed With Real Estate?

Moderated by Dinah Lenney, Lecturer, USC Master of Professional Writing Program

 

Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA)

250 South Grand Avenue

Los Angeles, CA

Parking $9 w/MOCA validation at the Walt Disney Concert Hall garage, enter from Lower Grand Ave.

Books will be available through Skylight Books.


From the invention of the suburb to the birth of Home and Garden Television, homeownership has long been a central part of the American dream. For decades, banking practices, government policies, and our faith in the ever-increasing value of real estate in the long run — bubble-bursts or no — have fueled an obsession with property. Americans build ballooning mansions, hunt for hidden architectural gems, drop thousands of dollars per square foot of urban condo or seaside shack, endlessly renovate fixer-uppers, and carefully outfit interiors. Why are we so desperate to own? Meghan Daum, author of Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House, visits Zócalo to recount her search for a place to call home and to explain the pleasures and perils of believing that only a house can make you whole.

 

 


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