The sense of connection to a place and home to me is something that has been eroded these last few decades in the US, primarily due to our cultural values being so bound to so-called free market policies that only self serve a relatively very few wealthy Americans, while the rest of the American working classes have seen a decline in their standard of living and wages.

Thus our culture now sees a house as a value commodity rather than a life-long residence. We also see the loss of homes in epic proportions via foreclosures.

Americans move much more as the job market treats them more like plug-and-play components than living breathing valuable members of an integrated community that can build some kind of history.

Less Americans now go to PTA meetings or go bowling because of all the advanced industrial countries, we Americans are forced to work the most with the least amount of vacation or sick leave, while the working class gets short shrifted on health care, education (costs that are skyrocketing take a look at UCSC) and retirement benefits ... a good majority of Americans dependent on SS that only comes in their sixties.

As the growing disparity between those that have and those that do not have, larger now than it has ever been in this country ... we see the results of the disintregation of a healthy downtown community, more gang violence, more drugs and more Americans homeless and being blamed for their homelessness, because they're lazy and irresponsible. How else could you lose your home to a foreclosure?(It couldn't be the wages being payed you, or rising health care costs, or losing your job right?)

A culture that only serves the elite class destroys that sense of history and connection to place and time. As Mahatma Ghandi once said "Poverty is the worst form of violence" And part of that violence done is one of identity and stability.