I do not care for Are We Done Yet? and The Money Pit is mediocre. But the original version of this film, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948), is a movie classic. Cary Grant is lured to Connecticut in order to escape, with his wife and two daughters, a Manhattan apartment grown too small for the average American family. The Blandings fall in love with an old house on a windy plot, and in the end the house proves uninhabitable. Having pulled the old structure down, the family designs the home of its dreams - and Mr. Blandings watches the bills pile up.
From the perspective of sixty years, the Blandings' ambitions represent the beginning of a civilization losing its way. The family's move to the suburbs led to sprawl. An inconvenient train journey for Mr. Blandings would become, over the subsequent decades, an automobile commute over a tangle of interstate highways. At the end of the film, in fact, Mr. Blandings wonders whether the dream of owning a home was already out of reach for average Americans, as the flurry of real estate activity instigated by the family inflated prices.
But Mr. Blandings got one thing right that we get wrong: he was very concerned about debt. An advertising executive, Mr. Blandings made $15,000 a year, roughly equal to a salary of $135,000 today. He hoped, originally, to keep construction costs below the equivalent of $90,000 today, and when they balloon to more than $300,000, he is beside himself. Imagine, Mr. Blandings is uncomfortable with paying twice his annual salary on his dream home, a structure his wife hopes to pass along to their children. In the midst of the sub-prime loan crisis, how many people in the United States were financing homes at ten times their annual salary?
In my lifetime, I can remember when qualifying for a loan was a big deal. For awhile there, everyone was getting one. I hope the banks have drawn in their horns and we might, as a people, be a little more cautious ourselves about borrowing.
