The first project I worked on in New York just went on the market for twenty-nine million dollars. I asked my bandmates to guess the list price the other day. Their guesses teetered between six and twelve million. I practically spent my whole summer drawing interior elevations and details for this project, and my guess was eighteen million dollars off the mark.

It was a purely speculative project—designed for an imaginary buyer. Our client has done a few of these luxury “flips”. She buys these old properties and hires us to make them sparkle. She’s pretty good at making a return on her investment. She bought her last property for just over 10 million in 2015 and sold it last fall for 20.5 million.

Architecture is a service profession. We need clients to make a living. It takes a lot of capital to make even modest buildings happen. Even my firm’s affordable housing projects cost around five-hundred dollars per square foot to build in Brooklyn. It is a dismal problem I feel unequipped to properly address, but I think about it a lot. How do I square the reality of working on a twenty-nine million dollar single-family brownstone while so many in this city struggle to keep a roof over their head?

We desperately need more housing not just rent stabilization. It seems obvious, but more housing stock will help stabilize rent costs. But with the red tape and the cost to construct in the city, it becomes very difficult to manifest.

Clearly it doesn’t have to be this way. Other cities are able to address their housing needs. Take Austin, which has increased its housing stock drastically since the pandemic hit. They made it easier to build primarily by relaxing zoning restrictions.

If we can design speculative twenty-nine million dollar mansions, we can speculate on designing better housing solutions. I’m critiquing myself here, but I also design affordable housing. Every rose has its thorns.

Songwriting can be speculative too. I’ve written songs speculating on the kind of world I want to live in, the kind of future I see for myself, and the like. I dove into this more in Building Spaceships Issue #2.

I may have already shared this song before, but it fits this week’s theme pretty well. Here’s my attempt at speculative songwriting. I don’t think it’ll get me twenty-nine million dollars, but it might help you imagine a different world.

Untempered

I turned my voice into something different 
I turned my face to the other side 
I saw the news – they had nothing to say 
The anchors had to adapt when the tide changed 

No more great losses, no more regression 
We're all getting paid now – no competition 
Laughter ain't coated with used ammunition 
And forgiveness comes two to a pack 

The forests don't burn like they used to 
Rich men don't smile like they used to 
Can you believe we used to stare at those screens?
Our necks had to adjust when the pressure gave 

No more great losses, no more regression 
We're all getting paid now – no competition 
Laughter ain't coated with used ammunition 
And forgiveness comes two to a pack