Customer Service Mantra.

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I am an extension of the customer.

I am always wrong.

I am always happy to help.

Working for others makes me smile.

Whole Foods is my anchor.

If you look further back, middle housing (townhomes, condos, apartments, triplexes, quadplexes, etc) are where the middle class historically found themselves living (usually, there are exceptions). Suburbs are mostly new and they are extremely wasteful. The idea that people lived in single family homes or even semi-detached housing with large green outdoor spaces (as opposed to shared courtyards) just strikes me as very, very silly and very, very American.

A better, more honest, more accurate description of the decline of the middle class is not just the disappearance of middle housing—it’s how much middle housing has deteriorated qualitatively. We no longer consider that apartments can be big enough to raise families in. Nor do we consider that they should be well-made enough to hold up to decades of uninterrupted housing.

“Luxury” condos have nothing on early-20th brownstones of the working class. And that’s the problem.

I am having trouble reconciling the same people who rightly said that density over space are now claiming that the birthright of the middle class is the ownership of implied single family homes, presumably with spacious yards. No.

There is no class worth establishing that pines for the trappings of the rich. And there’s no need to establish it anyway, it already exists. That’s the upper middle class.

I cannot believe people are saying that waste is the only sign of being middle class that matters again. But, what’s worse, I can believe people are buying it.

Eating the Image: The Graphic Designer and the Starving Audience, Frances C. Butler [jstor]

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