Yes, People Do Wash Rented Cars!

I’d like to thank the good folks here for having me back.  I’m going to use this stint to air out a few grievances, discuss a few ideas that are not quite paper worthy, and promote some new work of mine about cities, first about land use and then about local elections.  

But let’s start with the grievances.  

A pet peeve of mine is the use of the phase, "No one ever washed a rented car,” which has been credited to people ranging from Larry Summers to Tom Friedman, but was first used by an unnamed army sergeant in an article by Thomas Peters.   It is used to justify many things, particularly massive subsidies for homeownership.  And it is an abomination. 

There are two flaws.  First, it's just plain not true.  People wash rented cars all the time.  Not daily rentals, but leased cars, which constitute 18.5% of the cars on the road.  If you lease a car for two years, are you really going to let it be filthy the whole time?  Also, rental car companies wash their cars.  (Here is Avis boasting of its environmentally-friendly car washing techniques.)  And when you rent a car using my favorite method -- sticking your hand in the air and waiting for a cab to appear – these cars are usually clean too, having been washed by their owners in order to attract fares.  

Second, and this one is actually important, the moral of the metaphor is problematic.  It presupposes that the external benefits of ownership (increased investment in community and the care one gives to one’s own possessions) are inherently and always higher than the external benefits of non-ownership forms of use of resources, like renting, borrowing etc.  These forms of resource usage promote flexibility, mobility and the like, the benefits of which can outweigh the increased degree of care owners pay to their property and nearby associated property.  In the case of housing, here are lots of reasons to believe that the costs of the induced ownership outweigh its benefits.  For instance, Andrew Oswald has shown that there is a correlation between home ownership and unemployment, as owners of homes don't move to meet opportunities, leaving society with the costs of dealing with unemployment and firms with fewer good workers.  Figuring out whether home ownership or mobility should be encouraged is a complex question, as Bob Ellickson's excellent article on the differences in residential mobility in France and the United States, shows.  A preference for ownership rather than renting cannot merely be asserted, it must be proven. 

In making this determination, the metaphor does little to help us.  In the narrow case, no one -- at least as far as I know -- thinks we should subsidize car ownership in order to ensure that people invest in car washing (to avoid the social plague that third parties have to look at dirty cars.)   We instead think that the benefits of flexibility dominate.    And in the area where the metaphor is most frequently invoked, the public benefits of home ownership are rarely compared to the public harms of excessive home ownership.  If we did, we might end up saying, "Car owners spend way too much time washing their cars."