Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property: What the Founding Fathers Said About Homeownership

The Founding Fathers often disagreed about key principles as they debated the founding of the United States of America. But the right of a common man to own and control property may have been one of their most salient through lines.

Indeed, George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights described property ownership as a key component of "liberty," listing the inherent rights of men as "enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety."

In the Declaration of Independence, signed 250 years ago on July 4, 1776, Thomas Jefferson compressed Mason's phrasing into the famous "unalienable Rights": life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The grievances that drove the framers of the Constitution to separate from Britain, listed in Jefferson's declaration, paved the way for Americans to amass $48.7 trillion in real estate wealth. And the ideals of those founders, many of whom were prosperous real estate owners themselves, continue to influence American culture today.

Nearly 3 in 4 Americans believe that homeownership is part of the American dream, and 59% of people surveyed believe it's achievable in the U.S.

And yet the American dream—a home, kids, and a secure retirement—is more expensive than ever.

'Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist'

In the Declaration of Independence, the founders listed dozens of grievances against the British crown. The seventh of them related most closely to property.

The declaration chided the British monarchy for limiting immigration in the Colonies and for blocking its expansion westward. Or, as the document puts it, "refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands."

The framers kept the Constitution's language on property fairly minimal, noting only that Congress should have the power to regulate land. But property rights were central to much of their rhetoric at the time.

"Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist," John Adams said in 1790.

"All the property that is necessary to a man for the conservation of the individual and his propagation of the species is his natural right," said Benjamin Franklin, who built much of his wealth around land ownership.

Inevitably, that viewpoint was drawn from their vast real estate investments.

George Washington amassed 70,000 acres of land at one point—almost twice the size of the current District of Columbia. Washington aggressively bought many kinds of land across a stretch of the nation.

"Next to his wife, his family, and his nation," according to the historians of his family estate at Mount Vernon, "there was almost nothing George Washington loved more than real estate."

James Ely, a historian and professor at Vanderbilt University, looked extensively at the Founding Fathers' views on property. He noted that they were informed by a desire for everyday Americans to secure economic independence and autonomy outside of their government.

And they were inspired by the Magna Carta, which asserted that due process was required regarding property.

James Madison, inspired by that document, helped cement property rights into the Fifth Amendment.

"Madison placed these property clauses in the same amendment as safeguards governing criminal trials," Ely said. "This arrangement underlined the close tie between property rights and individual liberty in the eyes of the founding generation."

In that view, Madison found company among the other founders. Madison and Jefferson exchanged ideas about how the nation should formulate laws about the land. But Jefferson, America's idealist, often tied the potential for land ownership closely to the ideals of equality.

"It is too soon yet in our country to say that every man who cannot find employment but who can find uncultivated land, shall be at liberty to cultivate it, paying a moderate rent," Jefferson wrote to Madison in 1785. "But it is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land.

"The small landholders are the most precious part of a state," Jefferson said.

Complicated history of property rights

When it came time to codify the founders' beliefs into law, things quickly got complicated. The states quickly began clarifying and proscribing those property rights with new laws, while the courts put them into action.

Ely noted some of the many contradictions that followed. The Colonials confiscated British loyalists' properties after the Revolutionary War, for instance. And courts had to weigh personal property protections against the collective economic benefits of land-hungry infrastructure, like railroads.

Some of those contradictions have continued for a long, long time. In April, courts struck down the 158-year-old ban on distilling spirits in a private residence. President Ulysses S. Grant put that law into action to fight bootleggers. The government had successfully argued for a long time that its constitutional power to collect tax revenue took precedence over individual property rights.

Then came homeownership. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development lays out how fast the nation changed. In 1790, only New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, and Charleston, SC, had populations over 10,000. Industrialization caused an explosion in city life. A report from Realtor.com® tracks the key housing laws that followed.

Realtor.com senior economist Hannah Jones explains that expansion and the development of suburbs further expanded property ownership. In 1900, about half of Americans owned their homes. Today it's closer to two-thirds.

And property remains a major source of Americans' wealth. Real estate equity made up somewhere between 15% and 25% of total household net worth in the late 1940s. That grew to a peak of 40% in 2005, and has settled around 29% as of the latest data, Jones says.

"For as long as we have good data (since the 1980s), the house has always been the 'everyman' asset," Jones says. "Middle-class families have consistently had a considerable share of their net worth locked up in their home, while rich people mostly don't—they're in stocks and businesses instead.

"So homeownership isn't just common; it's the wealth-building vehicle for regular Americans specifically," Jones adds.

What's the future?

Today, young Americans are increasingly pessimistic about their prospects. Realtor.com economists estimated this year that the nation has a shortfall of more than 4 million homes.

Sherri Lawson Clark, a Wake Forest University anthropologist, sees the divide. Her students recite the oft-quoted ideals of the American dream: a single-family home and a white-picket fence. But that idea doesn't always line up with the lives they can afford, or even what they really want.

"They could be in a studio apartment, but what they want is the quality of life, the ability to travel and see places," Lawson Clark says. "They describe the American dream as a suburban space, but the reality of how they want to be and to live is in an urban setting."

That's not to say homeownership is lost to the next generation. Younger Americans are taking to property ownership later than generations before them, and opting for ownership at a different time in their lives. That has something to do with the rising cost of a starter home.

The situation has motivated a wave of new changes to laws around the nation. Congress, for all its infighting on other issues, has finally broken its gridlock to pass a bill aimed at housing affordability.

"We're constantly getting these messages about the dream, which is why it's difficult to shake even if their reality is not in alignment," Lawson Clark says. "The ideology has been so strong, but there have been some cracks. Not a crack in the dream, just what it means."