ARCHITECTURE

10 ft 20 ft
Dattner Associates and Grimshaw Architects, Via Verde, developed by Jonathan Rose and
Phipps Houses, The Bronx, New York, opened in 2012. Partial plan, first floor (two-bedroom
units). Drawn by Nabila Morales Pérez.
socioeconomic unit around which wealth is built. When
we recall that wealth more than income is becoming the
leading driver of economic inequality, we again see quite
concretely the ways in which architecture, together with
housing policy and economic policy, helps to produce inequality
by producing and managing wealth, as real estate.
Architectural specifics, from floor plans to construction
materials to styles to building names, also mix
with social codes and regulating norms to shape the economics
of inequality along racial and gender lines, with
the household as their basic unit. If these lines are less
visible in the above cases than the more directly economic
disparities measured in unit prices and median income, it
is worth noting that such metrics, too, can and have been
cross-correlated. For example, the U.S. Census noted that
from 2000 to 2011, where white households saw an average
3.5 percent increase in median net worth (mostly in
the upper three fifths), black households on average saw
their net worth decrease by 37.2 percent, most of which
was experienced by the lowest and middle fifths of the
economic spectrum. 69 To put these stark disparities differently:
in 2011 the median net worth in the upper 20
percent of white households was around $750,000; in
the upper 20 percent of black households it was around
$225,000. 70 Although by no means an exclusive factor, real
estate—as capital, or wealth—imparts a crucial dimension
to the complex socioeconomic matrix witnessed by these
numbers. It is reasonable to infer from them that, by and
large, black households simply own less architecture than
do white households while conversely, ownership of architecture—as
real estate—correlates with socioeconomic
status more generally.
Broadly construed, architecture is nevertheless
much more than an abject piece of property. As a floor
plan, an ambience, a collection of fixtures, a building type,
a neighborhood, a name, it is what makes real estate real.
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