Robert J. Schiller writes on Why Land and Homes Actually Tend to be Disappointing Investments:

Over the century from 1915 to 2015, though, the real value of American farmland (deflated by the Consumer Price Index) increased only 3.1 times, according to the Department of Agriculture. That comes to an average increase of only 1.1 percent a year — and with a growing population, that’s barely enough to keep per capita real land value unchanged.

According to my own data (relying on the S&P/Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index, which I helped create), real home prices rose even more slowly over the same period — a total increase of 1.8 times, which comes to an average of only 0.6 percent a year.

What all that amounts to is that neither farmland nor housing has been a great place to invest money over the long term. …

… we need to realize what land represents, even in Manhattan or Silicon Valley or any booming area. People in such places usually aren’t buying land for its own sake but for the myriad services that housing provides. A home is not just a place to sleep and store clothing and keepsakes. It can be a place that is convenient to a stimulating place of work, good schools and entertainment and, indeed, part of an entire human community.

… the slow long-term pace of farmland and home price increases is not surprising. Nor would it be shocking if this trend continued for the next century, despite price surges over the last few years.

A more extreme outcome is also quite plausible. In a hundred years, we might even see much of our former farmland converted back to wildlife preserves. In fact, it’s far from inconceivable that the real price of land could be even lower than it is right now.

You’re investing in a place when you buy a home. You’re not investing in a house. If you haven’t enjoyed your investment, it’s probably because you’re treating a plot of soil or pile of metal, plastic, and wood as if they were more valuable than the place you’ve put them.

Gracy Olmstead writes on Why America needs to revitalize its local politics:

…what would happen if at least a few of Washington’s elites returned home and invested in the communities they left behind? What if, instead of running for Congress, some of our politicians considered running for some local office? What if the journalists trying to make it in Washington, D.C., decided instead to invest in a local paper? What if, instead of covering the next Trump or Hillary Clinton rally, they decided to attend their local town hall meeting? What if those of us who live in or near the beltway spent a little less time fixating on the presidential election, and focused instead on city and county politics?

We often think of these things as being not nearly as important as national politics. We scoff at local matters as small and provincial. Where is the glory in covering a school board meeting? But the deleterious idea that what happens in Washington matters more than anything happening in the rest of the country is the root of our problem.

French political scientist and historian Alexis de Tocqueville believed America’s highly unique government worked because its citizens were active in the political sphere. They voted and attended town meetings, involved themselves in private associations, and went to church. But all these things have faded in popularity as our news and politics have become more centralized. Many of us don’t take the time to talk to our neighbors, let alone go to a town hall meeting. And when no one shows concern for the local sphere, it’s easy to feel unimportant and helpless, which results either in apathy or bitter anger — both of which we’re seeing in this election cycle.

Where do we think that national leaders take their cues from? They take them from local leaders. Local businesspeople. Local intellectuals. Locals.

Every “big” notion that Washington gets into its head ultimately comes from an experience of what works (or doesn’t) on the level of a state, or a city, or a smaller community someplace across this continent. If we stop cultivating local leaders, and local businesspeople, and local intellectuals—and most importantly if we stop communicating the experiences of the localities to the national leaders—the only place national leaders will have to turn is to their international peers.

If we want to make an impact, it’s easiest and usually the most important to try to do that on a small level. In time, it can filter up on the big stage of national politics if it’s worth holding up as a model for the nation.

I’ve written before about what suburbs do. I’ve thought a lot about why cities like Philadelphia and New York are so preferable compared to cities like Houston or states like Florida. Alex Balashov, writing on “why even driving through suburbia is soul crushing,” speaks to most of the reasons why suburbs are anathema:

The destruction of the pedestrian public realm is not merely an economic or ecological absurdity; it has real deleterious effects. For just one small example of many: life in a subdivision cul-de-sac keeps children from exploring and becoming conversant with the wider world around them, because it tethers their social lives and activities to their busy parents’ willingness to drive them somewhere. There’s literally nowhere for them to go. The spontaneity of childhood in the courtyard, on the street, or in the square gives way to the managed, curated, prearranged “play-date.” Small wonder that kids retreat within the four walls of their house and lead increasingly electronic lives. (The virtues of a private backyard are easily exaggerated; it’s vacuous and isolated, and kids quickly outgrow it.)

However, it’s been difficult to elucidate in specific physical terms what it is about suburbia that makes it so hostile to humanity. To someone with no training in architecture, it’s often experienced as a great, non-articulated existential malaise, like depression. You know it sucks, but it’s hard to say exactly why. The same holds true in reverse; North Americans who have not travelled abroad extensively and don’t have a clear basis for comparison can be tongue-tied when asked to explain what exactly makes a non-sprawl city street “charming” or “cozy.” It’s telling that we have no widespread cultural vernacular for why classical urban settlements, which draw on millennia of intellectual background and corpuses of architectural knowledge, are pleasant. It’s because Americans took that inheritance and unceremoniously discarded it, consonantly with the rise of the mass-produced automobile. It irks me that many of us know, on some level, that we live in a dystopian nightmare but can’t say what makes it a dystopian nightmare.

This Benedict Evans tweet came across my Twitter stream earlier: “New to the country, I am still at the stage where everything I see has a value precisely because I don’t know what value to give it.”

It’s a perfect way to think about experiencing any new place. Familiarity gives rise to complacency, and characteristics to place that might be genuinely remarkable become literally the opposite: unremarkable and unremarked upon aspects of the character of a place.

In considering what this looks like in my own daily life, it’s a reminder of the value of getting away from the normal and into the new—of experiencing new places, new adventures, new friendships—so that on returning to a familiar place it can be unfamiliar again, for a time.

Alan Jacobs writes on “the problem of modern identity” by telling the story of Miss Marple in Agatha Christie’s A Murder is Announced. In short:

“… Every village and small country place is full of people who’ve just come and settled there without any ties to bring them. The big houses have been sold, and the cottages have been converted and changed. And people just come — and all you know about them is what they say of themselves.” All you know about them is what they say of themselves — this is, in a nutshell, one of the core problems of modernity.

In a flat world, place matters more than ever. I really believe this, and I think explains why we still invest so much meaning in living where we live, whether it’s New York, San Francisco, or somewhere in the great unwashed middle.

In many ways I think we’re living through the triumph of libertarianism. We can mostly move to wherever we want and we can create the story about our lives we want to tell. We can live as we’d like, as free from any meaningful judgment from the local pastor—who doesn’t really know us—as we can from our neighbors, with whom we have equally vague relationships.

We’re proud of living in New York, but we know no New Yorkers, so to speak. We don’t become New Yorkers by living there; New Yorkers are people from New York. If we moved there, at what point are we from there?

I think one way to answer that is that we’re from a place when we become truly familiar with it; intimate in our knowledge of its history, its strange and defining characteristics, its prominent families and the disputes that have shaped the place, and the hopes with which the soil of a place has been fused with the glow of meaning that attracted us to it in the first place.