Wall Street Journal Lauds America’s ‘Extreme Renters Who Own Nothing,’ Including Their Own Clothes

Wall Street Journal Lauds America’s ‘Extreme Renters Who Own Nothing,’ Including Their Own Clothes

Jacob M. Thompson

With everything becoming so expensive and inflated in the United States and western nations, combined with a severe home affordability crisis, and companies shifting their models to reflect subscription, renting and leasing services, more and more people are becoming forever renters “who own nothing;” to the extreme end where some no longer even own basics such as the shirts off their backs, utensils, and other common items that normally would be owned. 

The World Economic Forum has prophesized that this would be exactly the case by 2030. In 2015, the WEF published an essay that expressed what life would probably be like in 2030. The result were many people living in smart cities, living in shared, communal buildings that no one owned; and every single item one could think of was rented, shared, and delivered by drone. This since deleted essay partly reads:

Welcome to the year 2030. Welcome to my city – or should I say, “our city”. I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes.

It might seem odd to you, but it makes perfect sense for us in this city. Everything you considered a product, has now become a service. We have access to transportation, accommodation, food and all the things we need in our daily lives. One by one all these things became free, so it ended up not making sense for us to own much.

It made no sense for us to own cars anymore, because we could call a driverless vehicle or a flying car for longer journeys within minutes.

In our city we don’t pay any rent, because someone else is using our free space whenever we do not need it. My living room is used for business meetings when I am not there.

Once in awhile, I will choose to cook for myself. It is easy – the necessary kitchen equipment is delivered at my door within minutes. Since transport became free, we stopped having all those things stuffed into our home. Why keep a pasta-maker and a crepe cooker crammed into our cupboards? We can just order them when we need them.

This also made the breakthrough of the circular economy easier. When products are turned into services, no one has an interest in things with a short life span. Everything is designed for durability, repairability and recyclability. The materials are flowing more quickly in our economy and can be transformed to new products pretty easily. 

Shopping? I can’t really remember what that is. For most of us, it has been turned into choosing things to use. Sometimes I find this fun, and sometimes I just want the algorithm to do it for me. It knows my taste better than I do by now.

It would appear these predictions are coming to pass and are on pace to be more fully realized in the next six or so years.

'Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published a report titled, “The Extreme Renters Who Own Nothing, Not Even Their Jeans; It’s not just leasing your car. Christmas trees, camping gear and even caskets are up for rent” – which documents how some young Americans are doing exactly what the WEF wrote about.

The article documents the lives of a handful of young couples who are embracing this forever renting mentality for a variety of different reasons: ease of access and the added mobility to travel more freely, recognizing the depreciation of equipment and hardware tools needed for business, avoiding the high pricetags upfront, or simply not needing certain articles of clothing and other items for more than a few times.

Some couples interviewed do own a few items such as their used vehicles, but practically everything else is rented or leased; such as Brittany Catucci (27) and Eric Markley, who live in a three-story townhouse in Emeryville, California, and also ‘rent their queen-size bed, Catucci’s work clothes and repair tools from Home Depot or AutoZone,’ the WSJ reported.

The WSJ further detailed this new economic shift and what it entails:

More...