On the construction and rental of "shit-boxes"

Stupid Time for Instagram Reels

I recently heard a description of “stupid time” as a means of counteracting the mental decay brought by the junk-food-esque effects of social media and short-form video. Someone (can’t remember who? Probably from a podcast?) described a group of housemates that would cordon off their Instagram Reels/TikTok video watching time to a set 15-minute daily chunk called Stupid Time. It would routinely balloon to 45 minutes, sure, but the point still stands: it’s easy to lose indiscriminate chunks of time to the attractions of TikTok, so why not try to box it into its own window of time, give it some boundaries?

I like the idea of “stupid time” mostly because, even if it doesn’t work all that well, it’s an entry in a new set of strategies to find health and flourishing in the shadow of these mind-manipulating new technologies that seem here to stay. And considering the sheer number of new and unexpected challenges I seem to be encountering daily, these kinds of efforts at finding the new rules of engagement are meaningful to me. Opting out of Instagram or TikTok is of course always an option¹ but if one’s life is in some way dependent on these platforms, then adapting seems to be the only alternative. “Social media literacy” and “tech education”² is a growing field of wisdom in which I’m equally lacking and curious.

In my “stupid time” with my Instagram Reels, I like trying to train my algorithm. It’s clear that the longer I spend watching one video, or if I click to view the comments, or share with a friend, or save the video, then the algorithm instantly learns to feed me more content of a similar nature. So every time I’m viewing my Reels on Instagram, I’m interacting tangibly and proximately with

1. a set of content blocks that the platform has served up to me, and also simultaneously with

2. the mechanism by which those content blocks are decided on.

It’s a dual-track interaction: I engage with the video and AT THE SAME TIME engage with the algorithm. There’s no encountering the algorithm without watching the videos, and watching the videos is never free of the watchful attention of the algorithm, learning from and trying to anticipate my behavior.

So for instance: right now, Instagram knows that I appreciate stand-up comedians joking about race and politics (@resrieriao is probably my favorite rn?), Lord of the Rings or Pride and Prejudice or Zelda or ITYSL memes, and videos of attractive women wearing very little clothing (hey, just being honest here! This is what the algorithm thinks of me!). These content blocks act on my mind before I really have the chance to react, and thus the algorithm wraps its tentacles around my lizard-brain-stem and feeds my attention accordingly. My feed is a constant stream of these types of content blocks, in some unintelligible order, interspersed with ads. I’d prefer to see less of the hyper-sexualized, incendiary, and/or cringey content the algorithm tries to feed me, but it requires a certain amount of self-awareness to notice when I’m seeing it, adapt my engagement, and thus re-train the algorithm. I’m also reminded of Augustine’s classic prayer, “Lord make me pure, but not yet:” even as I may say I want to see more refined content, the algorithm really knows how serious I am about that by observing my behavior.

Why do I bring this up? Well, three reasons:

1. I’d like to hear how you process your experiences with social media algorithms. Such a major presence in our lives, and I’m curious as to the wisdom you’ve gathered!

2. Algorithms read behaviors, not intentions. In that way, they can be a useful mirror towards understanding our desires and tendencies.

3. Interacting with social media algorithms is helping me understand the housing market.

The algorithms of housing

Here’s where I’m going with this: just like how interacting with social media is a two-sided interaction (with the content itself and with the algorithm that presented it to you) so is the housing market (with the apartment/home itself as well as with the market forces that presented it to you). The feedback loop for social media is instantaneous and pretty straightforward, while the feedback loop for housing is… significantly more complex, to say the least. But the comparison still holds.

For example, as recently reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer, my neighborhood and city is experiencing dramatic and rapid real estate development. Not of single-family row homes (for which Philadelphia has long been known) but apartments (grouped in increasingly larger and larger buildings). The incentives that are pressing developers are one set of “algorithms,” while the incentives that are enticing occupants (either renters or buyers) are another set of “algorithms.” The results of this collision will have frustrating and painful effects for generations.

Housing Market Hallucinations

The vast majority of renters that I work with currently are groups of Millennial and Gen-Z aged friends who are living together in a single apartment or rowhome so as to afford the rent.³ Unintentional communities would perhaps be the punchline to the joke you could make about this reality: rent far outstrips wages in areas where recent college grads want to live, and thus co-habitation is a necessity. But the construction of these rowhomes has, in my experience, tended to reflect a different set of inputs on the development side. Rather than a single home with relatively equivalent living spaces for different renters (i.e. everyone getting a similar size bedroom and private bathroom), I instead am encountering a few smaller bedrooms sharing one smaller bathroom combined with a MUCH larger bedroom with a similarly larger bathroom (often with two adjacent sinks, see the above picture from a brand new unit around the corner from the Berks St MFL stop). How would you interpret this phenomenon? To me, this looks like developers designing for families with multiple children in the smaller bedrooms, while parents occupy the larger suite with dual sinks. Because who else could afford and need a home this large than a dual-income family with kids? Great point, Wes! Because most Millennials and Gen-Zers sure can’t!

Correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding of affordability, school district access, and generational cultural shifts all suggest that Millennials and Gen-Zers have less money, fewer children, and are getting married later than prior generations. So why are we building homes for wealthy young parents with many children?

Brand new and already broken

Another trend I encounter as I explore the rentals and listings of Philadelphia is sloppy build quality in brand-new construction. This is a common conversation here in the Riverwards of Philly. I believe the official term for a hastily-thrown-together rental unit is “shit box.” There’s less mystery around why this occurs: cut-rate developers looking to save maximum costs on the expense side while reaping maximum rewards on the income side of the transaction. Simple.

But I’d argue that it’s a bit more complicated than this. For example, without fail, every single one of these brand-new apartments looks spectacular in the photos in their listings on Zillow, Apartments.com, and the MLS. Immersive light, massive windows, pristine kitchen islands adjoining spacious open-floor-plan living rooms, etc. Just take a look for yourself.

And yet, consistently, physically walking into these apartments and homes in person gives a radically different impression. Sloping floor grades, warping/bubbling vinyl flooring, poorly-fitting trims, aggressively bright lighting, doors that won’t latch, litter accumulating in window wells... the list is long. The photos on the app tell one story, while the in-person experience of these buildings tells another.

In my initial conversations with renters and buyers, I consistently remind them: pictures lie. Whether it’s via false positive or false negative, photographs tend to convey an inaccurate picture of how a space actually feels to physically occupy. As a home-shopper, it’s more important to try to sense the structure and floor plan of a space rather than the fixtures and colors and light conveyed by a photo. And yet… as with Instagram Reels, it’s pretty tough in the moment to train yourself to notice these next-level design elements rather than the surface-level flourishes.

Misguided Feedback Loops

There are a few unhealthy feedback loops at work here:

1. First, that home-shoppers see attractive photos, they like and favorite those locations, and thus that behavior conveys to developers on the other side of the app that they’ve built desirable housing units (regardless of quality).

2. Second, the absence of a positive feedback loop for developers that produce high-quality housing. The feedback that listing agents and landlords take seriously — how quickly a unit rents (Days On Market) and at what price (rent) — are determined by factors other than things like build quality and “integrity” of the photos, for instance. What matters far more to Rent and Days On Market is location, floor plan, and size. There’s no dependable signal to send to high-quality contractors and real estate developers that their extra effort is noticed or appreciated. “It’s no skin off my nose,” as the real estate developer complains to Mr Potter in It’s A Wonderful Life. There is equal reward from the market forces of contemporary renters for shoddy craftsmanship as there is for high quality investment. From the side of the developers, they look the same. They don’t experience the costs of sloppy and shoddy buildings.

The stakes of these broken feedback loops are pretty high, too. We’re in a climate crisis in no small part produced by the way we’ve designed the built environment: about 40% of global carbon emissions are produced by buildings. Leaky building envelopes have higher energy demands for heating and cooling. Poor craftsmanship in the foundations and structures of these homes writes a bill that will be paid by future generations, even if they appear sturdy enough for the present decade. Low quality fixtures and appliances require faster replacement and contribute to landfill waste. And I could just as easily apply a critique based on Instagram filters to the world of real estate photography… a dearth of honest representation in media can only produce (at best) a lack of trust and (at worst) perpetual misinformation. And on top of all this, at root is the lousy experience of renters and owners living in these homes that are uncomfortable, wasteful, and poorly constructed.

Retraining Real Estate Algorithms

I wish I had an easy answer for how to correct or even affect these trends. I’m sharing these thoughts as an introduction to a conversation I want to join more than a dissertation on possible solutions. If you have resources or ideas, please contribute in the comments or reach out to me!

As I write and reflect right now, a few things stand out to me:

1. We need to build stronger feedback loops to reward high-quality investment and development. Rent and Days On Market are easily the most important performance indicators for landlords and listing agents and developers, but they don’t reflect (and even actively conceal) distinctions in housing quality.

2. I’d love to see policies that protect against shoddy craftsmanship in rental unit construction. Perhaps tax abatements being made conditional, tied to inspections (i.e. if the inspector finds evidence of shoddy workmanship, tax abatements are withheld or reduced or delayed). Or maybe on the financing side: lenders would certainly be more interested in seeing that the asset they’ve backed is of a high enough quality to ensure its future viability. Perhaps lenders could find ways to tie the interest they charge on these construction projects to the quality of building the developers produce. I’m not a public policy or financing expert in any way, but strategies like this would go a long way towards ensuring the buildings we’re installing now will point towards a more sustainable and sturdy future than a shoddily-designed and broken one.

3. Philadelphia neighborhoods like East Falls, West Philly, and Mt Airy are well-stocked with massive, beautifully designed homes that are closer to being mansions than homes accessible to the working class. Many of these massive homes have, in the years since their construction, been sliced up to become individual rentable units, whereby an owner can scrounge up enough rent money to cover a significant mortgage and debt payment. On the one hand, these homes reflect investment incentives/algorithms that favored this style of architecture a few generations ago. On the other hand, they’re serving the same present purpose and suffering a similar misunderstanding as the brand new rentals being built here in the Philly Riverwards: these are homes designed to be forever homes of sprawling families that now find themselves in neighborhoods full of individuals or small groups of friends looking for affordability above all else. Big homes with rent price tags of $2000-3000 tend to require multiple roommates to live together, or the home to be split into smaller units. Design solutions to these questions are beyond me, but it’s clear that some combination of design and policy intervention could produce a more helpful feedback loop to the designers and developers of these properties. But to get to my point: these large, old homes weren’t designed with Instagram in mind. In other words, their layouts and designs haven’t been tailored to shoot up Zillow algorithms because they photograph particularly well, and thus they tend not to produce particularly sexy Zillow photos, and thus attract less buyer or renter attention. Given that reality, these buildings could represent an opportunity to buy low on spaces that could more meaningfully meet Millennials and Gen-Zers where they are, in the rental spaces that they find themselves in: struggling to pay rent, and turning to living with friends as a means of relieving that financial pressure.

Living in a world determined by algorithms feels about as permanent as living in a world determined by housing market forces. All of these algorithmic forces are less interested in giving us what we’re after (peace and flourishing, say) than getting what they want (attention and money). If you, individually, have found a solution to these calamities, then do share. But even if you’ve found a way out for yourself, then get back in the fray and help the rest of us. Forgive me for not offering more revolutionary insights than to slowly, piece by piece, develop the kind of wisdom and insight that can allow each of us to flourish in these neighborhoods and apps, even as we struggle to piece together longer-term and broader solutions. Carry on, friends.

1. More and more folks I know are opting out of toxic relationships with social media platforms, especially Twitter! Good riddance, Twitter! Emily Yoshida says Twitter is basically Fury Road from Mad Max, and that image has never left my head.

2. The Hard Fork podcast recently engaged with their teen listeners about social media literacy. Worth a listen!

3. I’m currently working on a piece about living with your friends, communal life. Share anything that might be of interest?