In the classic phenomenological treatise The Poetics of Space (1958), Gaston Bachelard writes, “If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” Homes brim not just with objects and people but with dreams. Dreams of wealth, leisure, love, belonging, stability, change. Perhaps this is a home’s most potent role: a repository for our dearest desires and aspirations.
But what about when multiple dreamers claim the same repository? A couple residing in a house, their rapidly growing children, their nosy neighbor, the busy-body president of their neighborhood homeowner’s association, the pencil-pushing loan officer who granted them a mortgage, the profiteering developers who financed the building, the underpaid laborer who built it, and its previous occupants all have very different things to stash. The home, then, comes to accumulate not only dreams that might intersect or overlap but also ones that come into direct conflict with another.
And where there are dreams, there are also nightmares. Homes can be broken, vacant, haunted. They can contain that which refuses to leave us or remind us of the depth of our emptiness. One could call this a curse.
The Curse, a Showtime series that wrapped its ten-episode run in January, concerns itself with the home as site of contestation—between those with power and those without, progressive language and extractive systems, deception and honesty, and ultimately, as Ben Davis writes in Artnet, “the line between reality and fantasy.” The show follows newly married couple Whitney and Asher Siegel (Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder), laughably “woke” real estate entrepreneurs with delusions of rectifying vast societal ills through their development of environmentally friendly single-family homes and an accompanying television show they hope to sell to HGTV (working title: Flip-lanthropy, eventually changed to Green Queen). The Curse’s strongest moments come when it dives into the gulf between the aspirations and actualities of this ambition, a gap ever-expanding in the real world, where increasingly massive sums are invested into techy companies spouting ludicrous claims to hack the world’s housing crisis.
Española passive house Kristin Tata
Much like the show’s uncanny reflection of social reality, the exteriors of the Siegels’ homes, completely covered in mirrored panels, display a distorted vision of the surrounding working-class New Mexican town of Española. These sleek abodes promise not only to function as shelter and lodging but also to revitalize the downtrodden community, save the environment through “ecoconscious” passive design, rectify the colonial dispossession of Native Americans, fight gentrification by setting aside revenue from home sales to subsidize the rent of displaced tenants, and empower women. If they happen to net the couple a massive profit, making them “look like geniuses” along the way, well, that’s just an added bonus.
With such a bold vision, one could say these aren’t your daddy’s developers—except, of course, they are. Whitney’s parents, notorious slumlords in the area, provide funding for the couple’s work, though she takes great pains to purge the internet of all evidence tying her to her parents and keep them out of Flip-lanthropy—reality TV is no place to get bogged down by reality. (Compounding the meta nature of the show within a show, Stone’s real-life father cofounded and serves as the chief design and construction officer of Hyphen Communities—a Phoenix-based developer of market-rate housing, or if you ask them, a group of “place-makers, value-creators, design-thinkers, and community-builders.”)
While Whitney perfectly embodies the hollow social commitments of the average liberal millennial, her parents represent similar contradictions within the boomer generation. They are bohemian, hippie types with funky interior décor, chunky Southwestern jewelry, and an in-home produce garden (fertilized with their own pee) who despite their symbolic gestures toward altruism and art operate as ruthless landlords. Whitney is stricken with crippling fear at the implication that her work could have the slightest negative social impact, but her parents are perfectly at peace with mistreating and evicting their tenants. The major difference between parents and child, rather than the content of business, seems to be comfort with its practices.
The generational divide depicted here also realistically represents a marked change in how real estate enterprises talk about housing. It’s not novel for developments to promise to be environmentally friendly, affordable, and in other ways socially good, but recent real estate ventures are rife with distinctly political language impossible to distinguish from Asher and Whitney’s pitches. In 2022, infamous WeWork founder Adam Neumann snagged $350 million from prestigious venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz for Flow, his new real estate company that “responds to the housing crisis” by allowing renters to “feel like they have ownership” through an “elevated community experience” (which will in turn make tenants more likely to “plunge their own toilets” rather than call a super). The first Flow project, a 639-unit apartment block that makes up about 20 percent of the company’s current six-building portfolio, recently opened in Fort Lauderdale.
An endless parade of companies with vaguely futuristic monikers like Lyvly, the Collective, Vivahouse, Venn, Dreamhouse, Zoku, Common, Roomrs, June Homes, SharedEasy, and Outpost Club evangelize “co-living,” chopping up apartments into dormitory-style units, often for leases as short as a month. Vivahouse, Venn, and the Outpost Club describe this arrangement as, respectively: “revolutionizing accommodation,” “ending the displacement of lower-income residents,” and building “a tight-knit community with shared passions and visions, thereby making the world we live in a better place.” (The Outpost Club has recently come under fire in New York City for illegally removing apartments from rent stabilization, hiking rents from $800 to $7,000 a month, and failing to prevent or remediate hazardous conditions like leaks, mold, and pest infestations.)
Just last August, the largest venture capital fund in Australia teamed up with executives at Facebook, Bumble, Uber, and Airbnb to pour $6 million into Kiki, an invite-only app to match hosts with subletters. The app promised to be “centered around people over property” and symbolize “the new way of living, a future world unchained from your rent.” (By January, the app pivoted to become a “girls only club” to help women “not just live” but “thrive,” even going so far as to hire its first female employee.)
There’s also a whole spate of housing-related apps such as Rhino, Obligo, Jetty, and LeaseLock that “solve” brokers’ fees, security deposits, and other high costs associated with renting by insuring the apartment upfront with the landlord and collecting monthly payments with interest from the renter, essentially loan-sharking. As a 2019 report in the New York Times put it, Rhino’s advertised vision of “a rental market without security deposits” promises to “lower housing costs, curb inequality and put money back in people’s pockets,” though an investigation by Motherboard found that the company systematically worked with landlords to overcharge low-income tenants.
If capitalists have recognized the power of a politics rooted in the home, then those of us interested in building a more egalitarian world must do so too.
The satire of The Curse provokes deep cringe in viewers because of the profusion of these real-world punch lines, but there’s a reason that the particular convergence of housing, tech, and progressive language has become so widespread in the first place. To put it bluntly: It’s the housing crisis, stupid. Half of American tenants are rent-burdened, putting over 30 percent of their income toward rent. Half of those tenants pay over 50 percent. Both home prices and homelessness are at all-time highs. For the real estate industry, that language is a way to acknowledge the precarity of tenants and prospective homebuyers while evading culpability.
We see a similar logic at work in episode 6 of The Curse, when Dougie (Benny Safdie), the irresistibly repulsive producer of Flip-lanthropy, tells Whitney it’s important to film her marital strife. “If we include … these moments of frustration,” he says, “then people are going to connect with you, and they’re going to think you’re being honest. And if they believe that you’re telling them the truth, then they have no reason to think that you’re hiding anything.” Yes, housing is expensive, but that’s not the fault of land speculators like Asher and Whitney; they’re actually helping to solve the issue! Yes, landlord greed has pushed affordability far out of reach, but co-living apps up-charging you for a glorified dorm room are actually envisioning a revolutionary new future!
The essentially aspirational nature of housing imbues this particular consumption-as-politics grift with formidable potency. Homes, as brick-and-mortar manifestations of the American dream, already serve as capacious repositories of desire that promise to grant us our every wish, from building wealth to gaining a sense of belonging—why shouldn’t they also be able to solve broader societal issues? Tech, endlessly parodiable in its promises to revolutionize the world through mundane products, only furthers this mystification, promoting a rental app or a new heating system as the means through which the object of the home takes on these new far-reaching properties.
The idea of the technologically optimized, social-justice home functions similarly to ideology as Terry Eagleton once defined it: “an imaginary resolution of real contradictions.” As Asher unconvincingly promises a reporter, “We believe gentrification doesn’t have to be a game of winners and losers…. There are no losers.” But what about those real contradictions? While these real estate companies promise a harmonious world without conflict or contradiction, their political efforts belie another reality—one in which political conflict is pressing and necessary.
Across the country, security deposit loan sharks Rhino and LeaseLock have lobbied hard for what they call “renters’ choice” laws, requiring landlords to offer tenants “a security deposit alternative” like what their apps provide. These laws, which have passed in two states and have support from elected officials (including former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio) in seventeen more, allow landlords to circumvent rules regulating security deposits. The former vice president of sales at Rhino was caught telling landlords that the app is “also a great way for you guys to push deposits higher.”
Co-living companies like Outpost Club have repeatedly been caught evading rental laws, but as one co-living app founder told researchers at the London School of Economics, “If we just push innovation hard, then the government has to catch up. There’s no doubt in my mind that legislation will catch up. They will have no choice. Just like the cabs, you know, the taxis and Uber—same exact thing.” In The Curse, Asher and Whitney are vocally supportive of a Native American tribe’s side in a local land dispute—until they are questioned about how that could undermine their own property rights, and then they coldly rattle off legal arguments for why their land would always be protected against redistribution.
Despite whatever altruistic fantasies the real estate industry may offer, it is acutely aware of opposing social and economic interests. The propagation of these fantasies thus serves as a Truman Show–esque form of pacification, the construction of a frictionless vision of the world to divert scrutiny away from those with power. This vision no doubt has its attractions, most of all to investors champing at the bit to break into a lucrative industry, but it proves impossible to reconcile with reality. As Whitney says of Flip-lanthropy’s immaculately manicured pilot episode, “Something feels off.… I mean, it’s edited well. It just feels lifeless or something.” But the fact that the utopian visions offered by real estate are deceptive, absurd, and ultimately lifeless doesn’t invalidate the idea that our homes can and should be part of a broader political vision. In fact, it suggests that homes must be central to it, if only to counter the influence of our adversaries. If capitalists have recognized the power of a politics rooted in the home, then those of us interested in building a more egalitarian world must do so too.
Tenants are dreaming more vivid an image of a different world than any show ever could—and forcing those dreams into reality.
In a review for the New Yorker, Jennifer Wilson describes The Curse as “interested in whose ideas about the future we give credence to.” Whose opinions matter: those who speculate on land or those “whose futures have been recklessly speculated against”? It’s not laughable to imagine that homes could play a crucial role in solving everything from economic inequality to climate change. It’s only laughable to imagine that that could happen without conflict.
In parallel to Asher and Whitney’s story, the series follows Abshir (Barkhad Abdi) and his two daughters, an immigrant family first staying in a homeless shelter, then squatting in one of the Siegels’ investment properties. In the pilot, Asher offers one young daughter Nala (Hikmah Warsame) $100 on camera before taking it back, for which she marks him with the series’ titular curse. In the finale, among other mind-boggling ways this curse reaches fulfillment, the family comes into sole, permanent ownership of the home in which they’ve been squatting (though Abshir remains understandably wary of unaffordable property taxes and other high costs).
The show opts to keep the causality between these events relatively open to interpretation. For a project so invested in meticulously documenting acute instances of political hypocrisy, the lack of an equally explicit political response to exploitation or grievance, apart from brief mentions of Native land struggle and one character’s appearing to belong to a far-right militia, is notable. Show creators Fielder and Safdie seem to prefer specificity in their diagnosis of ills more than in their prescriptions of medicine—understandable, maybe even commendable, given their wealth and fame.
The broad arc of Abshir and Nala’s family, especially as some of the scant few characters who end the series in a better place than they began it, does however make a clear statement: Conflict is generative. More to the point: The way to win a stable home is to directly curse the person who controls the roof over your own head, the person who steals money out of your hands. The show isn’t naive: Abshir and Nala’s home is far from perfect (certainly not one of the Siegels’ gaudy reflective pads) and, to be sure, future challenges remain. But undoubtedly, Nala’s curse (and perhaps more directly the act of squatting) generated progress. A property owner’s dream of profit and fame differed from a family’s dream of a place to live. The family won.
The process of doing so, however cloudy it may be in the show, traces a narrative arc sweeping across the country. In an Outpost Club co-living building in Brooklyn, residents have banded together to form a tenants’ association and launched a multi-month rent strike, demanding better living conditions and a return of their units to rent-stabilized status. After forcing a mayoral veto on a “renters’ choice” bill approved by city council, Baltimore Renters United won a new program in which the city covers security deposits for tenants with incomes under 80 percent of the area median. Low-income tenants in Minnesota have pushed out their landlord and seized buildings as cooperatives. A statewide coalition of tenant groups in New York recently announced a bold push to build hundreds of thousands of units of green social housing—environmentally friendly, publicly owned, democratically controlled, and permanently affordable.
And in Española—the real Española—tenants at a large housing complex have formed the Alianza Tenant Union, threatening a rent strike and other actions until management ends widespread harassment and poor living conditions. Where The Curse declines to portray an explicitly political fight for housing justice, others are carrying it out. Tenants are dreaming more vivid an image of a different world than any show ever could—and forcing those dreams into reality too. Despite the fantasy spun in ad copy and pitch decks, homes are cursed to be sites of political conflict for the foreseeable future. It’s just a question of who is cursing whom.