The Third Act of Work

Work was centered on the home for much of history. Now it’s back.

Last month, I had a piece on remote work published in Plough, entitled The Third Act of Work. Go read it, and consider subscribing to Plough while you are there.

Recently, another piece in The New Atlantis, Make Suburbia Weird, by the writer

Clare Coffey

, touched similar themes. I encourage you to read that as well, but below is an excerpt that identifies the potential structural advantage suburbs have for those who want to bring work home, not just to work from home:

Suburbs, like cities and country, do in fact have a characteristic good. They seem so strange, so uncannily empty on the surface, because all their possibility is in their private underside — for adults as well as children. They are tiny fiefdoms, to arrange and order optimally and devote to your demented little experiments — space enough to make real decisions, on a scale small enough for democratic accessibility. In the suburbs, everyone is a miniature aristocrat.

Or they should be. In actuality, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, keeping chickens is prohibited; your cottage industries are jointly throttled by zoning authorities and the USDA; and the pot still, for the time being, remains a victim of various alphabet agencies’ ceaseless assault on women’s hopes and dreams. And that’s before you deal with the HOA and the neighbors in general. If you like restoring old cars or refrigerators, you cannot keep future projects lying around your yard. If your gardening ambitions extend beyond the purchase of a riding mower, you may have to fight for them. It is not out of the question that the very colors you paint your home in are regulated. In general, anything too ambitious, too visible, too eccentric, or too fun will be suspect.

The traditional selling point of the suburbs, as a kind of nature preserve for serene and pure life, unsullied by any bumptious activity, is at odds with its real good — as a ferment of individual projects and their caprices. As much as we all hate legal crackdowns on innocent goods, there is simply no constituency for deregulating the suburbs as long as people are buying into them on these terms. And even if there were, the financial underpinnings of the suburbs forbid it. You have your fun in the cities, and if you’ve done well, you leave them, like eels migrating to the Sargasso Sea, to raise your young in the suburbs. Eventually, you fund your second round of fun (in Florida this time) with the next generation of in-migrants, who will buy your house for more than you paid for it. Everyone has a gun to everyone else’s head, watching for a sign of unpredictable movement that might impair the property values.

As Coffey identifies, there are regulatory strictures that prevent many of the uses to which we miniature aristocrats would turn our homes if given the opportunity. Many homeowners make their home a nest egg, not just a nest, and so have rational cause to police every potential injury to its value from their neighbors. Thus HOAs, and restrictive covenants, and Nextdoor.

I’ll end by noting that this theme is one of Nature/Culture’s oldest. From the third installment:

Take care of the smallest elements. Attending to the individual residents and workers within a suburb is important. There is far more combined latent creativity and more individual care residing those individuals in total than you can muster yourself. Part of the difficulty of involving oneself in the suburbs is the lack of latitude these individual actors have to make decisions on behalf of their community, bound as they are by single-use zoning, deed restrictions, homeowners' associations, parking minimums, etc. Perhaps a way to support them would be to crack these barriers and let residents undertake a thousand small experiments whose success will generate cascading upsides and whose failures will be constrained in scope.