When a press release from a frustrated young woman threatening to sue the real estate industry “for the sake of her generation” if she couldn’t get a mortgage found its way into my inbox, I was intrigued.

Despite the dubious premise of her threats, Carolyn Houck, an upstart developer of utopian communities, nonetheless represents feelings about real estate, its professionals and the sense of the younger landless generation being cheated by the landed Boomers that were not new to me. Describing herself as “hopping mad” about business as usual in the industry, Houck said she’s ready to take her case to court.

“I’m a statistic,” Houck told me when reached in her home in Sonoma County. “When you have unstable living environments, you have fundamental stress - that causes you to not be able to be effective in the world. All these future-thinking young people are spending all their time on housing, and I don’t think the older generation has any idea what we’re experiencing.”

Well, yes and no. As widely reported, nobody is particularly happy about the current market. Now that the secondary market for home loans has forced lenders to tighten lending standards, buyers can’t get loans and sellers can’t get buyers. The result is that for the first-time home buyer who needs a jumbo or low-down-payment loan, getting into the market is as hard as it ever was during the boom years.

The affordability index in California remains high: Less than 20 percent of households can afford a median-priced home with a 20 percent down payment. In 2007, the California Association of Realtors, which produces this statistic, rejiggered the numbers to paint a rosier picture - changing the necessary down payment from 20 percent to 10 percent and the “median-priced home” to an “entry-level home.” With the new stats, the affordability index now stands at 24 percent.

The result is that many young, well-educated professionals who have jobs but no parental money tree to tap have little hope of achieving what their middle- and working-class parents did: buying a habitable, well-located home that they will eventually pay off.

But have young people - especially those like Houck who are working at society’s fringes - always been able to buy a home and enjoy that stability while they pursue their dreams? Hardly. If anything, national homeownership rates have climbed over the years: Between 1890 and 1940 they hovered below 50 percent, and now the number is close to 70 percent but falling. More young people (including immigrants and single women) are buying homes than ever before, and the pervasive feeling among them is that owning real estate is a basic entitlement, a human right, if you will.

This ethos has even spread to the young visionaries. (I noticed this peculiar new real estate passion first in 2000, when one of the city’s most popular anarchist performance artists confessed that he could shop and talk real estate 24/7.)

While Houck, a 34-year-old former branding consultant who described herself as a “savvy international entrepreneur,” may be emblematic of her generation in some ways, her real estate schemes chart new territory. After working in branding and research marketing in New York City, she relocated to California. It was then that she embarked on what she refers to as “immersive research” into people that she believes should shape the future - progressive, youthful innovators and inventors who are committed to large-scale change. “These are the people with the best hope for solving problems of global warming, suburban sprawl and lack of community,” she says. “And most of them are dealing with housing problems.”

After getting evicted and dealing with her own share of difficult housing situations (hence the term immersive research), she began shopping for a property. She and two of her friends attempted to buy a live/work space in San Luis Obispo that could be developed into a cooperative community center, but the group couldn’t get a loan, and parents who were lending their support pulled out. Eventually, Houck returned to the Bay Area, where she was raised, and with her mother’s help bought what she calls “a shack” in Guerneville.

But her real estate goal is not a private slice of the good life, but a far grander vision. She is buying land for the purpose of building sustainable permaculture communities created through the residents’ sweat equity.

Naturbia, the name for her project, was coined by a couple of Hong Kong architects who used the term to describe a built environment that also functions as a healthy biological ecosystem. To date, Houck has bought one plot of forest in Rio Nido (Sonoma County) and 10 acres outside San Luis Obispo. The idea is for the Naturbia communities to have in-town community centers and rural eco-villages, and offer an antidote to McMansioned suburbia.

She characterizes her vision as a sort of green, futuristic Odd Fellows, a fraternal organization that created a similar mix of urban and rural developments. Her online art book “Naturbia” reads as a sort of 200-plus page brochure for the project ( www.naturbia.com). In short, she is trying to become a new kind of developer - utopian rather than self-serving, community-minded rather than profit-minded.

The first obstacle? Buying the properties. Why? She says most real estate professionals don’t want to work with her - sometimes because they deem her project too unfeasible, or her financial profile not up to snuff.

“I’ve experienced age discrimination, I’ve experienced profiling,” she told me by phone. Her youthful appearance, Houck feels, is the reason real estate agents deny her services. Although she has yet to find a lawyer to take her case, Houck claims she is serious about her litigious threats.

Although Houck’s experience seems hyperbolic - eager agents run rampant in most communities - I know from experience that sometimes agents “fire” their clients because they feel like they’re too high-maintenance or don’t understand where they’re coming from. I was fired by my first agent, who told me point-blank that I was too much work, because I was finding my own properties online before Internet research became the norm. (This was long before I began writing this column.)

Listening to Houck’s ideas, I can’t help but wish she had millions of dollars to realize her dreams. At the same time, it’s hard to blame real estate agents or loan brokers for choosing their clients carefully. With the commission structure, where income derives solely from closed deals, a difficult buyer without a massive down payment or a track record of building successful developments can represent an express ticket to the poorhouse. Whatever the agents’ reasons, these were individual decisions, not a conspiracy to thwart the progress of civilization.

Maybe I’m perverse, but the complaints about the real estate industry fascinate me. I understand the feelings they spring from - I’ve felt those feelings myself. But they also seem like a misplaced sense of betrayal: Our real estate agents aren’t creating the widening gap between the rich and poor, our decimated earning power or our bazillion-dollar war in Iraq.

Yet in the past decade, the real estate market has increasingly been interpreted as the stage for a vast morality play involving greed, desperation and deception. In this mythology, real estate isn’t so much a free market in which people buy and sell homes according to a sometimes complicated set of regulations and traditions, but a treacherous scheme against the common man.

We are our homes. The American dream, once connected to political and religious freedom and self-determination, has become shorthand for the experience of happily buying a 3/2 with a Wolf range. Anything less has become the American nightmare. For the many young middle-class people facing exorbitant prices and impossible loan qualifications, the loss is real and meaningful. As the middle class splits into the landed and the landless, real estate remains the metaphor for our own little paradise lost.

Source:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/09/01/BU2IRSLJS.DTL&hw=real+estate&sn=002&sc=1000