ARCHITECTURE

ity is challenged as a matter of moral principle, and partially
addressed at a social level, while being accepted at an
economic level. This ambiguity cannot be readily resolved,
since it is the means by which inequality governs. That is:
economic inequality, whether measured by income or by
accumulated wealth, governs by submitting citizens of the
global, neoliberal marketplace to a calculus that guides
the production and management of cities, suburbs, towns,
villages, and buildings by projecting virtue at an abstract
level while withholding concretely the possibility of genuine
parity. As an art form capable of bearing complex
and contradictory meanings, architecture often acts as a
guarantor of such virtue while also securing its absence.
For, contrary to what is normally assumed, the economic
calculus is not solely quantitative. Think about the gap
that separates moral outrage at inequality from the embarrassed
recognition of its necessity under the current system—leading
even outspoken critics to ask, with a hint of
irony but also in earnest, for only “a little bit less.”
2.1.1 Norms
This gap is maintained by qualitative factors, including
architectural ones, that appeal to a sense of
“home,” or of social status, or of a natural order of things.
Which means that architecture is more than just an artful
overlay or disguise that covers up the unsavory equations
driving real estate development spreadsheets. It is a prerequisite.
Even in its crudest form, or in its most latent (as an
“architecture without architects” designed and built, say,
by real estate developers), architecture plays into every calculation,
if only as the material form taken by any quantity
of usable—and rentable, or saleable—space. It does not do
so merely as what economists call an “externality,” or an
incalculable quality that contributes to value, as in the real-estate
mantra, “location, location, location.” Rather, inequality
is drawn and built into every building that is conceived
as exchangeable property. Look closely at any such
house or apartment plan, and you will see it.
Stiglitz argues that “inequality is, to a very large
extent, the result of government policies that shape and direct
the forces of technology and markets and broader societal
forces.” 4 This is true. In the United States, a measured
degree of economic inequality is a matter of government
policy. But it is also true that “the forces of technology and
markets and broader societal forces” shape government
policy. Specific policies, such as those that encourage
homeownership by offering tax deductions on mortgage
interest, do help shape the real estate markets. However,
such policies are themselves shaped by narratives that
extoll intangible qualities derived from the arts of living
and the arts of governing. Without these narratives, the
basic unit that defines the current housing system—the
household—would evoke nothing more than square footage,
rather than the social norms and morays of “family,”
“hearth,” and “home” that we know it does [See 1.1.3].
Just as they have governed in the recent past
through the practice of racial redlining and restrictive
covenants, or through today’s “poor doors,” housing markets
continue to govern through those social codes by
which households are legally and financially constituted.
As before, such codes take the white, middle-class, heterosexual,
patriarchal family as their tacit model. The
difference is that today, they appeal more fervently than
ever to the consumer’s or investor’s need for security. It
is this need to mitigate the emotional and financial risks
that permeate an environment in which housing is, for a
broad swath of the class spectrum, a primary generator of
wealth as well as a place where social norms, including the
desire for belonging (to a family, to a community, to a nation)
are enacted and reinforced. In certain metropolitan
or suburban locales as well as in certain state and federal
policies, social codes such as those pertaining to marriage
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