ARCHITECTURE

Perhaps predictably, the practices of US government
agencies conform to these trends as well. The
United States Census Bureau, part of the Department of
Commerce, is the nation’s key source of public data on demographic
and economic change. Though it deals largely
in quantitative data, the Census Bureau does cite the
“middle class” as a prominent part of their narrative on
inequality, despite or because of the difficulty in defining
it [See HH: 1978]. 7 Such a term lends a degree of productive
ambiguity to the Bureau’s data, since a vast majority
of U.S. citizens self-define as middle class. 8
Putting all of this and additional data to use, academic
scholarship on inequality has recently proliferated,
with Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century
receiving much attention. Though it contains a wealth of
analysis, Piketty’s decision to sidestep the potential problems
associated with the term “middle class” is telling of
a singular focus. 9 Given this emblematic bracketing out
of cultural variables on the part of the economist, alongside
the previously outlined implication of the state in
the housing market and the similar patterns visible in the
private sector, we choose to focus here on the discursive
techniques used by governmental institutions.
1.2.2 Framing Data
Appropriately then, it is widely accepted that
inequality, especially when construed as a threat to the
“American Dream,” is a defining issue of our time, as the
following quotations related to the 2016 presidential campaign
indicate:
Millions of our fellow citizens across the broad
middle class feel as if the American Dream is now
out of their reach. . . . Too many of the poor have
lost hope that a path to a better life is within their
grasp. While the last eight years have been pretty
good ones for top earners, they’ve been a lost decade
for the rest of America. 10
—Jeb Bush, 2015
Today, more people are getting by, but they are
still not getting ahead. At the same time, the top 25
hedge fund managers make more than all the kindergarten
teachers in the country combined, and
the top CEOs earn 300 times more than a typical
American worker. It’s time for everyday Americans
to share in growth and prosperity. 11
—Hillary Clinton, May 2014
Income inequality is a symptom of a bigger problem:
opportunity inequality. 12
—Marco Rubio, 2015
We live in one of the wealthiest countries on earth,
yet children go hungry, veterans sleep out on the
streets and senior citizens cannot afford their prescription
drugs. This is what a rigged economic
system looks like. 13
—Bernie Sanders, 2015
Taken at face value, the exhortations of scholars and the
talking points for would-be presidents evince a common
understanding of inequality as a principally economic issue
whose explanations are best framed by considerations
of a nebulously defined middle class. Though finer points
are debated, a consensus emerges about the basic nature
of the problem at hand, which in turn dictates the nature
of any possible solutions. This rhetorical loop defines the
current limits of the discourse on inequality. But the fact
nevertheless remains—as demonstrated quite specifically
by housing—that understandings and usages of “inequality”
as a call-to-action cannot be uniformly or exclusively
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