Always and never at home

Instead they�ve produced a metastasizing cancer by quickening gentrification, eroding the complex fabric of neighborhoods to the status of mere way stations, and advancing a homogenizing tide of bleach wood and incandescent bulbs. Their project aims to remake real estate and its occupants in the face of capital in the �liquid modern� era: frictionless, highly mobile, always and never at home. What a lively waltz! Such a project merrily plunges into the city as a radical, top-down �solution��which is to say, the gussying-up of a preexisting �solution� (roommates) for a select bunch, a meager Band-Aid for a problem with deep roots in decades of housing policy, disintegrating incomes, and the financialization of real estate. Such muck and mire�the displaced bodies and theft of neglected but occupied residences�vaporizes in a snap! Turns out rethinking housing from the ground up was awfully simple. 

The Baffler: The Tragedy of the Commons, March 1, 2018