While mortgage market meltdowns and environmental crises bespeak its large scale consequences, Home Economics bursts the bubble of the American Dream of homeownership to reveal the deep human costs of suburbanization and automobilization. In candid interviews, two working mothers and a teenager speak about the social tolls of long daily commutes, racial tensions, crime, the Protestant work ethic, and the meaning of home. Subtly and sensitively, Home Economics explores the relation between the built environment and the daily lives of residents of a bedroom community outside Los Angeles whose testimony reveals a sad irony—home ownership is often achieved at the expense of the very values a home is said to represent.