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Section 1: Overview

The American Dream of Homeownership

We will examine informational texts to understand homeownership in the United States and the issues surrounding it. Through the examination of songs, videos, and other cultural evidence related to the mythology of homeownership in the United States, we will consider the following question: Why has homeownership been considered part of the American Dream?

We will then build background knowledge by studying the history of homeownership in America and examining material that addresses the Federal Housing Administration, the rise of suburbia, and the mortgage crisis of 2008 while considering the following question: How has the dream of homeownership manifested itself in American political, social, and cultural history?

To complete our background study, we will read texts and analyze data about the changing patterns of homeownership in the United States while considering the following question: What do recent trends in US society suggest about the viability of American homeownership?

  • Lesson 1:

    We will begin our examination of homeownership and the American Dream by considering the following question: Why has homeownership been considered part of the American Dream? We will see how the mythology of owning a home has been built through songs such as “Home, Sweet Home,” written in 1823, and learn about the post–World War II building boom that made owning a home accessible to many, but not all, Americans.

  • Lesson 2:

    We will read and analyze a 1988 newspaper article that articulates why many Americans at that time continued to want to purchase and own homes. The text presents the first opportunity to analyze an informational source for perspective, reasoning, and use of evidence, as we move toward analyzing and delineating arguments later in the unit.

  • Lesson 3:

    We will begin to address the following question: How has the dream of homeownership manifested itself in American political, social, and cultural history? To do so, we will examine a cultural phenomenon associated with homeownership in America, the rise of the suburbs in the era following World War II. We will learn how developers like William Levitt made owning a dream home accessible to many White Americans, encouraging “White flight” from urban to suburban areas and developing instant communities full of what some observers characterized as indistinguishable “little boxes.”

  • Lesson 4:

    We will learn about the importance of paying attention to authors’ use of language and will begin compiling powerful and interesting sentences in our Mentor Sentence Journals.

  • Lesson 5:

    We will consider how the US government has been involved in supporting or overseeing the dream of homeownership in America. We will begin by studying summary information about the creation of the Federal Housing Administration in 1934, a federal policy initiative that was designed to create incentives and support for getting a mortgage loan and purchasing a home. We will form claims about the history and impacts of the FHA, including its different effects on home buying for racial minorities. To study more recent trends in the US housing market, we will examine a longitudinal graph of the changing prices of houses sold in the United States from 1963 to 2018 and practice data interpretation by forming a claim about an observation from the data.

  • Lesson 6:

    We will build on our knowledge about mortgages and how they have affected homeownership by studying the concepts of home mortgages, fixed- and adjustable-rate mortgages, and subprime mortgages.

  • Lesson 7:

    To build on our knowledge about mortgages and how they have affected homeownership, we will learn how predatory lending and the overreliance on subprime mortgages led to the 2008 global economic collapse. We will then develop our close reading skills by analyzing central claims, main-idea topic sentences, and supporting information in an article about the mortgage crisis and recession written by a member of the Federal Reserve System.

  • Lesson 8:

    We will consider the following question: What do recent trends in US society suggest about the viability of American homeownership? To do so, we will examine research about homeownership in the United States, focusing on the shifting attitudes about owning a home in the years following the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007–2010. We will analyze the analytical claims and supporting data presented in a survey-based study conducted by the Pew Research Center, and we will consider the credibility and reliability of this information source, comparing it to the reliability of the data and perspective of a 2016 study from the real estate firm Trulia.

  • Lesson 9:

    We will examine and practice delineating the argument in an op-ed essay about homeownership in the United States, written during the home mortgage crisis of 2008. For homework, we will review the expectations of the Section 1 Diagnostic.

  • Lesson 10:

    We will write a response to the question “What does current research data suggest about homeownership in the United States?” We will use several data sources from the Pew Research Center, Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, and at least one other source from the unit.

  • Lesson 11:

    We will review feedback on the Section Diagnostic. We will use the feedback to make revisions to our work.

  • Lesson 12:

    We will commence an Independent Reading Program in which we choose texts to read independently as we progress through the unit. We will learn how to choose texts, what activities we may complete, about the final task, and about any materials we will use as we read our independent reading texts. We will begin by reading our texts, using Tools to help us take notes and analyze important textual elements.