The Ritual of Homebuying in Desert Cities: A Visual Ethnography

Abstract

The process of home-buying is commonly discussed and understood in terms of both asset acquisition and its connection to speculative financial practices utilized to attempt to correct for structural market crises. These dimensions further the possibilities for potential wealth accumulation that assist individuals, families, and corporate actors. This visual essay, emerging out of a decade-long investigation of the housing market in the American state of Arizona, USA, is the result of a collaboration between a visual ethnographer and a sociologist, which aimed to nuance an understanding of housing markets along social, spatial, and historical axes. The essay reveals connections between interpersonal dynamics of taste-making and, contrary to dominant liberal economic logic, the sometimes-limited horizons of choices for families attempting to engage in what we describe as “the ritual of homebuying.” Socially and historically, we discuss how the practice involves the enlistment of a number of peripheral actors attempting to facilitate the home-buying process who use tactics to draw families into the housing market. Spatially, families with aspiring middle-class values are, often enough, driven to peripheral urban and suburban zones to try to align their budgets and their ideals. Ultimately then, what turns out to be decisive is the narrow set of parameters as defined by the web of actors inside the real estate market, rather than, as some agents within the real estate industry abstractly argue, “what the market will bear.” Put differently, what the market will bear is narrowly defined choices that intersect with cultural values.