ARCHITECTURE

this 10 percent is not necessarily the same 10 percent of
wage earners represented by the tenants of New York by
Gehry, since even in “very high inequality” of labor income,
that 10 percent would command only 45 percent of
the wages. The difference—between wealth due to capital
and wealth due to wages—is what accounts for the much
higher measure of “total inequality” projected by Piketty,
in which 10 percent of the population accounts for a combined
60 percent of wages and capital. 17
Conceived as a useful commodity, then, New York
by Gehry attains prices and values that govern the relative
upper end of the residential real estate market in large,
wealthy cities like New York. Conceived as capital, however,
New York by Gehry assimilates those prices and values
into an investment designed to profit from the environment
that both Piketty and Stiglitz describe, wherein an increasingly
smaller proportion of the population controls an increasingly
greater proportion of the wealth. As a diagram
of wage inequality, then, New York by Gehry is par for the
course; as a diagram of wealth inequality, it is exemplary.
2.1.3 Surveys and Indexes
Piketty also points out that in the United States,
owning real estate constitutes the primary form of capital
accumulation for about nine of the top 10 percent by
wealth, where, it “accounts for half of total wealth and for
some individuals more than three quarters.” 18 Below that,
the importance of real estate in determining household
wealth is often still greater. While above, in the top 1 percent,
its significance diminishes in relation to securities
and other financial instruments, the importance of which
is near total among the very largest fortunes. To the extent
that its financial performance depends on high earners,
while also contributing to the retirement portfolios
of college professors who invest with TIAA-CREF, and to
the performance of publicly traded shares in Forest City
Enterprises, New York by Gehry operates at both levels.
However, assuming that it is the primary residence
for all 899 of the households it harbors, its residents
occupy a slightly eccentric position relative to the
norms enforced by national policies. According to the
2013 American Housing Survey, of the 115.8 million occupied
housing units nationwide, only about 40 million
were rentals, of which only 880,000 cost $2,500 per
month or more. When the data are divided this way, the
residents of New York by Gehry represent less than 0.1
percent of the general population. This is different than
saying that they are in the top decile of income and are
therefore among the nation’s elites. Instead, it reminds us
that the particular way of life represented by the building
is quite unusual, and would be even more so if we factor
in the relative scarcity of residential rental buildings with
50 or more units, which comprise about 3.5 million total
units. Far more common are the country’s 62.7 million
owner-occupied detached houses. 19 This is no surprise, of
course, since it reflects the widespread patterns of homeownership
that extend well into the lower middle class.
That the data exist in this particular form, however, is
perhaps more telling.
As a technique for governing as well as a basis
for extracting profit, inequality operates according to a
fluid set of rules, categories, and procedures. The most
visible of these (written into the word’s mathematical
connotations) is the act of counting and of measuring. In
the contemporary United States, as elsewhere, although
the individual level has been studied, the basic unit for
generating data on economic inequality remains the
household. 20 Commonly, these data are incorporated into
comparative, macroeconomic quanta such as the Gini
coefficient, which serve as synthetic indexes. The World
Bank, for example, defines its quanta as follows: “[The]
Gini index measures the extent to which the distribution
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