While the dynamics of a high-cost housing market may cause particular tensions in Santa Fe, there is a growing national concern among policy makers about disparities in income and asset accumulation between rich and poor. In the late 1960s the wealthiest 1 percent of American households owned about 20 percent of the nation's total household wealth. By 1989, the top 1 percent held 39 percent of that wealth, with the bottom 80 percent in control of only 15 percent. Home ownership, imbued as it is with symbolic value, is a way of bringing more people into the mainstream and lessening the growing gap between those with resources and everyone else. A democracy depends on the capacity and willingness of people to play a civic role.
Home ownership strengthens a democracy by giving people a stake in their community.
When the number of stakeholders decreases rather than increases, the civic connections that create and sustain community are weakened. For some it means playing a more active role with neighbors and engaging in some kind of action to improve the community. For example, Betty G., a married mother in her late twenties with two children, had never voted. Since buying a home, she has registered to vote, knows who her city councillor is, and is organizing her neighbors to get a stop sign installed on her corner. She had never been active as a tenant but, upon owning, came to believe she had a role to play in keeping the neighborhood safer for her children.