Dec 7, 2022
One paradox of the new ugliness is that it flattens the distinction between the rich, the very rich, the superrich, and the merely fortunate by ripping them all off in turn. These days housing at the most elite strata sucks nearly as much as the simply bourgeois kind. According to a parade of entertaining New York Times stories, residents of the toothpick-like towers on Manhattan’s Billionaires’ Row complain of elevator breakdowns, “catastrophic” flooding from poor plumbing, and “metal partitions [that] groan as buildings sway” in the wind. Shittiness is a big tent — and the tent is falling apart.
‘why is everything so ugly?’, n+1′s painfully good piece on urban life under neoliberalism
