We flirted with buying a house this summer. We didn’t, but that’s another story. The process of looking and thinking and scheming got me interested in the meaning and value of real estate for the first time, really, though all of us already know too much about loans, sub-prime, collapsed economies, and so on. At the same time, and of course not unrelated, I started watching HGTV’s show Real Estate Intervention. The show is quick, well-paced, dramatic, and full of all the sorts of small and big stories needed to keep attention riveted. In those stories, it also sets out a sort of capitalist ultimatum, nicely tailored to our economic and cultural moment, but always a lesson about capitalism as such.
The show has a straightforward method and storytelling structure. A person or couple is faced with the problem of selling a home. The home hasn’t sold, and some sort of urgent situation comes up necessitating quick sale (note: things regularly end poorly…this is not feel-good television). So, the show brings in “real estate expert” Mike Aubrey to assess the problem and offer solutions, and the music and visual edits invest the moment with all due seriousness. It is serious. Narrative tension inevitably comes from the reluctance of the homeowner(s) to go along with the advice and accept Aubrey’s diagnosis of their sale-problem. Maybe they take his advice, maybe not. Maybe it sells, maybe not. The consequences are always real and serious.
Real Estate Intervention is in many ways just a chronicle of our difficult moment. It is also practical, being HGTV and all that, showing you bits and pieces of how to more easily sell one’s home (hint: it has to do with asking less for the property). But it also reveals something very important, to my mind, about the relationship between sentiment and capital.
A house is an important part of one’s world. How could it be otherwise? After all, a house is where we eat, sleep, argue, cuddle, laugh, host, grow older, maybe raise a child or two, and invest physical and emotional labor in decoration, renovation, and just general occupation. A house is a connection to place. That makes it spiritual.
As well, over the past decade and a half, a house, aside from a job, is a primary way for regular folks to make money, whether that be by way of access to credit or consistent, even extreme growth in value.
When you mix these two things together, a house becomes an existential phenomenon. It ceases to feel like a commodity. For all the snark some might have for the cliché “the American dream of home ownership,” that turn of phrase means something. People do dream of having a place invested in all ways with family and self. (Is the alternative of rental better? I’d rather say that landlords do the devil’s work.) Paint on the walls is not just paint. Any couple who has made it through choosing from the paint-card wall at your local hardware store knows this is serious emotional business! Adornments of body and place – this means everything. To then live, love, fight, coddle, grow, suffer, support, and all of that so very human stuff in the midst of that adornment, all in a structure we call a “house,” makes a home part of our very existence.
So, you can’t be surprised when Aubrey’s advice is received with hostility and despair. If you watch the show, you can’t help but be frustrated with folks’ bad choices and stubbornness. And yet it is obvious why there is so much despair. Real Estate Intervention isn’t about an emotional appreciation of your home, it is about the financial viability of your proposed sale. Aubrey captures it perfectly in perhaps the show’s signature phrase – one that recurs, but would never be the advertisement tagline – that “value is what the market will bear.” What the market will bear. Wow. All of that deep meaning, rendered as an output of market-force inputs.
At that moment, we see capitalism’s ultimatum. It says that the existential is not, and indeed cannot, factor into what we call “value.” This is why capitalism is defined by its alienating effect. Not because I don’t like capitalism or hate money or whatever other shrug-off one might have about that remark. But because capitalism operates with a notion of value completely alien to a sense of value permeating daily life. Real Estate Intervention makes that so explicit that baring it is almost too much to bear. Sure, the real immediate pain is that of a particular couple or family, but the pain also extends outward from the screen, describing most of where we live and what we do. Once we leave the house, our value as people is just like the actual value of where we make our home lives: what the market will bear.
This is a painful lesson. Sometimes I think Real Estate Intervention buries this too deeply. It is television, after all, on a network dedicated to loving your home, not seeing it as one of the most intimate sites of alienation. But the capitalist ultimatum comes with every show. When I see that moment, and feel the highly televisually constructed (and completely real) despair and astonishment at alienation, I wonder if this might in fact be the most politically radical show around.
