Writing for the Baffler website, Kyle Paoletta examines how the condo-ization of cities—including his home city of Boston—imports the aesthetics and social relations of the suburbs into the city. Despite this, Paoletta suggests that the solution to skyrocketing rents in cities might in fact be to build a lot more condos, not fewer. Read an excerpt from the piece below, or the full text here.
But what, exactly, is rolling in along with that tide of bright young coders and consultants? Most of them were raised in the suburbs they now shun, and unsurprisingly the slate of newfangled necessities that have sprung up to serve them replicate the rhythms and comforts of life in the sprawl. This is the age of the “small but mighty” Target, the first of the big box stores to shrink itself to scale in order to gain proximity to all the sparkling new condos. There’s always plenty of Ubers and Lyfts idling outside those Targets, called in by the ex-suburbanites who are much more comfortable sitting in traffic than braving the hoi polloi of public transit on the select occasions when they choose to venture out into the cities they’re so intent on rediscovering. And those time are few, as now even the most upscale meals can be delivered— Foodler! Caviar! Seamless! Zomida!— and there’s a home-service app —Washio for laundry! StyleBee for haircuts!— for just about everything else their mothers used to take care of.
For the rest of us, the most obvious sign of the changing times is those condos, all of which ascribe to the same aesthetic: a melding of neutral tones and glass. Examples abound, everywhere from Crown Heights, where sleek, supposedly modern buildings are being wedged between pre-war apartments, to Albuquerque, where pueblo architecture is being shunned in favor of blah minimalism. Here in my neighborhood, Cambridgeport, the representative version of this development goes by the name of Chroma.
Image: The “Chroma” condo development in Boston. Via bldup.com.