Newsweek writer discusses first book, journalism

Dan McGinn is a national correspondent for Newsweek and has been writing for the magazine for 15 years. He just finished his first book, House Lust: America's Obsession With Our Homes. He gradauted magna cum laude from Boston College with majors in finance and English. He also served as an editor for The Heights.

What is your book about?

It's a history of the consumer side of the real estate boom: how Americans went crazy for houses during the first part of the 21st century - in much the same way that they went crazy for dot com stocks in the late '90s. After the tech stock market bust, there were three or four pretty good books that looked at what drove that boom and how things got so out of hand. With this book, I was trying to capture that same frenzy that went on around houses - why did people come to desire such big, big houses? Why were so many people enamored with building a brand new house from scratch? How did these mammoth kitchen and master bath renovations become so commonplace? There's a chapter looking at how half a million people became real estate agents during the boom. There's a chapter on get-rich-quick schemes involving real estate and one on why so many people began to want vacation homes. So basically, it explores the full gamut of irrational exuberance for houses.

So does America display a different attitude toward housing than other places in the world?

In some ways, it does. Houses in America are much, much larger than they are overseas. If you go to certain parts of Europe, the cool thing is to own a really old house - if you're a more established family, you want to live in a house that you're family has owned for 10 generations. In America, more people would like to build from scratch. So, there are definitely differences. But, you know, there are indications of a worldwide property boom. Australia and parts of Europe both recently had property booms. I think part of what made people so fascinated by real estate is that the prices were going up and up and up, and if you owned a house in certain suburbs for a few years and watched all the houses around you selling for immense sums of money, suddenly it felt like you were getting rich just by owning your own house. But in the book, I argue there was a lot more to it than that; among other things, the rise of HGTV, real estate media started to fuel the frenzy. Americans are notoriously poor savers now, I think that exacerbated it because people felt increasingly dependant on their house to go up in value because they weren't saving outside of the their property. It's very much not an economic book, even though the housing boom was economic, it's much a look at the social and cultural fascination.

How did you go about getting information?

I've been a reporter at Newsweek for almost 15 years, so this was definitely the biggest reporting project I've ever done, but I'd reported on the housing markets for Newsweek periodically throughout the boom and I've lived through it. My family and I live in the suburbs of Boston in one of markets where housing values were going up. When we'd go to barbeques and Christmas parties, we'd hear a lot of people talking about renovations and whether they should trade up to a better neighborhood, so structuring the book in terms of finding the behaviors I wanted to focus on was pretty easy, matching up geographies was one challenge.

How did that compare to writing articles?

When I write a story for Newsweek, I'm often talking with my editor every couple of days. When you write a book, you'll often go weeks without talking to your editor. So sort of the feedback loop is extended. I kept my job at Newsweek while writing the book, so most of the work was done at nights, weekends, vacation days, and things like that that. So trying to fit it all in was definitely a challenge.

Did you delve into the political aspect of the housing market?

I didn't so much. Alan Greenspan's name is in there a couple of times, and I mentioned the notion that the government, for decades, has promoted the idea of home ownership via tax deductions and things like that, but in terms of partisan politics, no - there's not a lot of policy in the book, I guess you could say.

Do you have any advice for aspiring journalists at BC?

Well one of the things that is important in journalism is that they care about where you went to college and about your resume, but they really care about your clips. If you're trying for a chef's job, they want you to cook something. If you want to be an architect, they want to see pictures of what you built. If you're a reporter, it all comes down to the clips. Try to get as many good published articles as you can - whether it's in The Heights, The Newton Tab, or your hometown paper in the summer.

How did working on The Heights prepare you?

There are more similarities than you would guess. It sounds ironic, but when you're sitting around discussing stories with people who are often the same age as you are and are often your friends, the stories might be different and the level of the discussion might be different, but when you're sitting there late at night trying to think of the perfect headline, it feels remarkably similar - kind of like a college newspaper on steroids.