A good way to think of property porn . . . property porn? Yes, property porn, known more formally as property pornography . . . is not to imagine stark-naked houses cavorting between the hedgerows. Think instead of ‘food porn,’ with which most of us are likely familiar in all its glossy, irresistibly scrumptious flesh, captured in lurid photographic festivals of obscenity and reimagined trundling towards our open mouth on a fork.
We owe thanks to United Kingdom columnist, author, and housing commentator Vicky Spratt for drawing our attention to property porn. She asks whether the famous ‘American Dream’ (writ appropriately international) is an incontinent and intercontinental urge to splurge on a media-driven porn addiction?
If so, many of the reasons why people think they need to own property may not be true at all. Those reasons traditionally include a need for ever-more ostentatious shelter, for leaving a finely polished nest egg to the wee’uns, for keeping up with (and hopefully surpassing) the Joneses, and for demonstrating a profitable knack for home-buy, home-sell investment.
Read Spratt’s intriguing take on this subject in The Guardian: ‘Property porn’: is TV’s obsession with home buying fuelling the UK’s housing crisis?
