Death to Greige

I just reread Kate Wagner's piece for The Nation, "Liberating Our Homes From the Real Estate–Industrial Complex" that dissects the rise of greige as a decorating theme, and feel like there's another pernicious incentive at work that wasn't mentioned (or if it was mentioned, I missed it and you can ignore the rest of this!). You should read that first for context.

Back? OK.

At the intersection of platformization and houses-as-assets capitalism is the idea that greigifying everything, as well as eliminating taste, also reduces every house to objects that Zillow and Redfin can most easily monetize, by which I mean attributes that can be counted: square footage, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, acreage, age, these are all things that the platforms can readily filter and sort on. Those messy, human characteristics like style and sense of space and environment are things Zillow and Redfin don't know how to sort [except in the crudest of ways], so the platforms would like to eliminate them from the equation. Platformization and greigification go hand in glove.

At its crudest, this reduction to lowest common denominators renders houses scattered across a school district as identikit as the apartments in a new block of rentals so that, for the benefit of capitalism, they can be marketed the same way. The goal is to take individually built houses and render them as the output of mass production after the fact.

Now ask yourself who benefits from this. The answer is "people who want to buy houses in large numbers as assets without actually looking at them". In other words, people who want houses to be not merely assets, but *commodities*. 

And of course, these are not "people" at all, but investment firms. 

Ultimately this is a painful echo of 2008. The original goal of CBOs was to financially commodify mortgages regardless of the underlying properties. Greigification seeks to physically commodify the properties themselves.

p.s. If you're interested in this kind of thing, you should be following Kate's blog, McMansion Hell and her column in The Nation.