ARCHITECTURE

of income or consumption expenditure among individuals
or households within an economy deviates from a
perfectly equal distribution.” Measured this way, in 2010
(the most complete dataset as of this writing), the United
States had a Gini index of .411, as compared to significantly
lower (and therefore “less unequal”) indexes in Tunisia
(.358), the Slovak Republic (.273), Denmark (.269), and the
United Kingdom (.380), among others. 21
Although it obscures more granular differences,
this tells us that the United States is among the most unequal
of advanced economies. A closer look, however, tells
us more about how such indexes work both to measure
inequality and to reproduce it by providing one way of
calculating the differences that make markets move. Gini
metadata indicate that datasets were drawn from a variety
of national sources, which have been correlated according
to the “central concept of ‘equivalized household disposable
income,’” or, essentially, after-tax income adjusted
for household size. 22 In the case of the United States, these
data were translated from the Annual Social and Economic
Supplement to the Current Population Survey, which is
compiled jointly by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department
of Labor Statistics. 23 It is based on interviews
with “a probability selected sample of about 60,000 selected
households” that begins with an address and then
sorts for eligibility to exclude vacant units, business, and
other nonresidential addresses. 24 Telephone interviews
are then conducted over a period of four months to determine
and verify household data pertaining to occupancy,
family makeup, employment, and income. 25
In this way the survey, and hence the data, presupposes
and utilizes the basic infrastructure of housing,
including the postal system, the telephone system, and all
of those other systems that combine in the delimitation
and enclosure of the unit itself. Scaling up, the U.S. Current
Population Survey essentially supplements data gathered
via similar methods through the annual American
Community Survey, which samples about 150,000 households.
Most comprehensive of all is the full U.S. Census
conducted every ten years, the most recent of which was
also completed in 2010. 26
From the other direction, data related to housing
stock itself are compiled annually by the Department
of Housing and Urban Development in collaboration with
the U.S. Census Bureau in the American Housing Survey
(AHS). In this case the object of study is the physical “housing
unit” rather than the socioeconomic “household,” with
the aim being to “[ask] questions about the quality of housing
in the United States.” 27 The Census Bureau indicates
that “policy analysts, program managers, budget analysts,
and Congressional staff use AHS data to monitor supply
and demand, as well as changes in housing conditions and
costs, in order to assess housing needs.” 28 Since the vast
majority of public policy related to housing in the United
States is market-based, it quickly becomes clear that the
AHS is, in effect, a market survey that helps to shape, rather
than merely measure, its object of study: the housing
unit. 29 If this is not self-evident, the AHS website makes it
so, when it adds euphemistically that “academic researchers
and private organizations also use AHS data in efforts
of specific interest and concern to their respective communities.”
30 This is another way of illustrating how the AHS
makes itself available to the real estate industry. The maps
of inequality provided by the U.S. Census and the Gini index
correlate with the market surveyed by the AHS. Together,
these point to an important way that lives are governed
where the housing system and the real estate system
meet; where the basic commodity is the housing unit and
where the basic unit of governance is the household.
Tied as it is to the housing unit, the household is
a distinctly infrastructural category that presupposes an
entire urban field. It also presupposes tangible architectur-
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