We don’t build housing like we used to. Per-capita housing starts never recovered from the 2008 crash and the supply deficit outside of the sunbelt is even worse. But this blog post isn’t a YIMBY screed. That’s right, it’s another abstruse geo project shrouded in alienating politics.
In 1996, landscape architect James Corner and photographer Alex MacLean published Taking Measures Across the American Landscape, which used aerial photography of water, agriculture, energy and urban expansion to explore the representation and reality of American land use. Inspired by this seminal work, and by my own creeping dread, I scraped Zillow for listings in XYZ tiles and made a map of American houses where each tile is a listing.
Housing too is a measure. And it’s a measure you can buy. (Maybe.) What better way to represent America than the dream itself?
Our remaining housing is a non-renewable resource, one a growing, renewing, population must now set itself upon. Like any site of extraction, mineral, labor, or residential, the nature of extraction reflects the nature of the land. Western low-slung xeriscaped ranch houses transition to Midwest pitched-roof craftsmans and new-build McMansions in the southern suburbs.
And sure, you can find those places where modernity collapses context. But perhaps these greenfield little boxes and articulated five-over-ones are just the last leathery leaves of my tomatoes in autumn, a brief budding amidst decay, and a moment later, they too are gone.