During the depression, when millions were jobless and homeless, the yearning for a home of one's own was one of the most powerful economic motivations in capitalist societies. In the United States today the desire for home ownership is still strong, but ever since the end of World War II the percentage of new housing devoted to rental apartments has been soaring. As late as 1955 apartments accounted for only 8 percent of new housing starts. By 1961 it reached 24 percent. By 1969, for the first time in the United States, more building permits were being issued for apartment construction than for private homes. Apartment living, for a variety of reasons, is 'in.' It is particularly in among young people who, in the words of MIT Professor Burnham Kelly, want 'minimum- involvement housing.'
Minimum involvement is precisely what the user of a throw-away product gets for his money. It is also what temporary structures and modular components foster. Commitments to apartments are, almost by definition, shorter term commitments than those made by a homeowner to his home. The trend toward residential renting thus underscores the tendency toward ever-briefer relationships with the physical environment. (It might be noted that millions of American home 'owners,' having purchased a home with a down payment of 10 percent or less, are actually no more than surrogate owners for banks and other lending institutions. For these families, the monthly check to the bank is no different from the rent check to the landlord. Their ownership is essentially metaphorical, and since they lack a strong financial stake in their property, they also frequently lack the homeowner's strong psychological commitment to it.)
More striking than this, however, has been the recent upsurge of rental activity in fields in which it was all but unknown in the past. David Riesman has written: 'People are fond of their cars; they like to talk about them – something that comes out very clearly in interviews – but their affection for any one in particular rarely reaches enough intensity to become long-term.' This is reflected in the fact that the average car owner in the United States keeps his automobile only three and a half years; many of the more affluent trade in their automobiles every year or two. In turn, this accounts for the existence of a twentybillion-dollar used car business in the United States. It was the automotive industry that first succeeded in destroying the traditional notion that a major purchase had to be a permanent commitment. The annual model changeover, high-powered advertising, backed by the industry's willingness to offer trade-in allowances, made the purchase of a new (or new used) car a relatively frequent occurrence in the life of the average American male. In effect, it shortened the interval between purchases, thereby shortening the duration of the relationship between an owner and any one vehicle.
In recent years, however, a spectacular new force has emerged to challenge many of the most deeply ingrained patterns of the automotive industry. This is the auto rental business. Today in the United States millions of motorists rent automobiles from time to time for periods of a few hours up to several months. Many big-city dwellers, especially in New York where parking is a nightmare, refuse to own a car, preferring to rent one for weekend trips to the country, or even for in-town trips that are inconvenient by public transit. Autos today can be rented with a minimum of red tape at almost any US airport, railroad station or hotel.
Moreover, Americans have carried the rental habit abroad with them. Nearly half a million of them rent cars while overseas each year. This figure is expected to rise to nearly a million by 1975, and the big American rental companies, operating now in some fifty countries around the globe, are beginning to run into foreign competitors. Simultaneously, European motorists are beginning to emulate the Americans. A cartoon in
The rise of auto rentals, meanwhile, has been paralleled by the emergence in the United States of a new kind of general store – one which sells nothing but rents everything. There are now some 9000 such stores in the United States with an annual rental volume on the order of one billion dollars and a growth rate of from 10 to 20 percent per year. Virtually 50 percent of these stores were not in business five years ago. Today, there is scarcely a product that cannot be rented, from ladders and lawn equipment to mink coats and originals Rouaults.
In Los Angeles, rental firms provide live shrubs and trees for real estate developers who wish to landscape model homes temporarily. 'Plants enhance – rent living plants,' says the sign on the side of a truck in San Francisco. In Philadelphia one may rent shirts. Elsewhere, Americans now rent everything from gowns, crutches, jewels, TV sets, camping equipment, air conditioners, wheelchairs, linens, skis, tape recorders, champagne fountains, and silverware. A West Coast men's club rented a human skeleton for a demonstration, and an ad in the
Not long ago the Swedish women's magazine
Impatient Americans are not waiting for 1985. Indeed, one of the most significant aspects of the booming rental business is the rise of furniture rental. Some manufacturers and many rental firms will now furnish entire small apartments for as little as twenty to fifty dollars per month, down to the drapes, rugs and ashtrays. 'You arrive in town in the morning,' says one airline stewardess, 'and by evening you've got a swinging pad.' Says a Canadian transferred to New York: 'It's new, it's colorful, and I don't have to worry about carting it all over the world when I'm transferred.'
William James once wrote that 'lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or on being.' The rise of rentalism is a move away from lives based on having and it reflects the increase in doing and being. If the people of the future live faster than the people of the past, they must also be far more flexible. They are like broken field runners – and it is hard to sidestep a tackle when loaded down with possessions. They want the advantage of affluence and the latest that technology has to offer, but not the responsibility that has, until now, accompanied the accumulation of possessions. They recognize that to survive among the uncertainties of rapid change they must learn to travel light.
Whatever its broader effects, however, rentalism shortens still further the duration of the relationships between man and the things that he uses. This is made clear by asking a simple question: How many cars – rented, borrowed or owned – pass through the hands of the average American male in a lifetime? The answer for car owners might be in the range of twenty to fifty. For active car renters, however, the figure might run as high as 200 or more. While the buyer's average relationship with a particular vehicle extends over many months or years, the renter's average link with any one particular car is extremely short-lived.
Renting has the net effect of multiplying the number of people with successive relationships to the same object, and thus reducing, on average, the duration of such relationships. When we extend this principle to a very wide range of products, it becomes clear that the rise of rentalism parallels and reinforces the impact of throw- away items, temporary structures and modularism.
It is important here to turn for a moment to the notion of obsolescence. For the fear of product obsolescence drives businessmen to innovation at the same time that it impels the consumer toward rented, disposable or temporary products. The very idea of obsolescence is disturbing to people bred on the ideal of permanence, and it is particularly upsetting when thought to be planned. Planned obsolescence has been the target of so much recent social criticism that the unwary reader might be led to regard it as the primary or even exclusive cause of the trend toward shorter relational durations.
There is no doubt that some businessmen conspire to shorten the useful life of their products in order to guarantee replacement sales. There is, similarly, no doubt that many of the annual model changes with which American (and other) consumers are increasingly familiar are not technologically substantive. Detroit's autos today deliver no more mileage per gallon of gasoline than they did ten model changes back, and the oil companies, for all the additives about which they boast, still put a turtle, not a tiger, in the tank. Moreover, it is incontestable that Madison Avenue frequently exaggerates the importance of new features and encourages consumers to dispose of partially worn-out goods to make way for the new.
It is therefore true that the consumer is sometimes caught in a carefully engineered trap – an old product whose death has been deliberately hastened by its manufacturer, and the simultaneous appearance of a 'new improved' model advertised as the latest heaven-sent triumph of advanced technology.
Nevertheless, these reasons by themselves cannot begin to account for the fantastic rate of turnover of the products in our lives. Rapid obsolescence is an integral part of the entire accelerative process – a process involving not merely the life span of sparkplugs, but of whole societies. Bound up with the rise of science and the speed-up in the acquisition of knowledge, this historic process can hardly be attributed to the evil design of a few
