Apartment envy

on home tour videos and the housing crisis

If your social feeds are anything like mine, you likely encounter home tours quite often. So many of these videos exist across the web that they could be categorized into subgenres. There are Caleb Simpson’s spur-of-the-moment tours featuring the apartments of metropolitan strangers. There are the ones produced by media channels like Apartment Therapy and Never Too Small, showcasing how people make homes of small spaces. There’s also the lavish, celebrity type a la Architectural Digest’s Open Door. The house tour, though very popular and varied today, is not by any means a new phenomenon. There has always been media about people’s homes and how they adorn them. The most obvious example of this is MTV Cribs—the early aughts series dedicated to the dwellings of famous actors, athletes, musicians, and socialites. 

Much like the Architectural Digest (AD) tours of today, Cribs gave working-class people like me and, presumably, you access to celebs’ intimate spaces, where they nap and snack and shit. Though, there is a notable vibe difference between the two. Most AD tours are posh and composed, emphasizing the seemingly idyllic lifestyles of its subjects. Whereas, Cribs was, generally speaking, more flashy and ostentatious, almost to a campy effect. Lil Wayne and his dozen cars. Hulk Hogan and his four-headed shower. We didn’t tune into Cribs for beauty, we watched for the theatrics of wealth. The AD videos have their theatrics too, but they’re subdued. In these tours, a spotlight is placed on the lifestyles of the rich, portraying them as picturesque and effortless, like an inevitable quality of success instead of what it might actually be: a masquerade. Inside Dakota Johnson’s home, limes were the star of the show. Sitting in the light of that sun-soaked kitchen, they looked as sexy as limes can look. “I love limes! I love them!” Johnson exclaimed. “And I love to present them like this in my house.” Later on, during an interview with Jimmy Kimmel, the actress admitted to being allergic to limes and shared that they were placed in her home as props. Watching the tour after learning this, I realized Johnson’s praise of the limes, which I previously read as sincere, was tinged with nervous sarcasm. Ashley Tisdale made a similar confession while showing her home, revealing that she bought hundreds of books just for the occasion.

On another side of the interior design Internet, you’ll spot another kind of home tour. With this lineup, there probably won’t be an abundance of limes or four-headed showers, but you can count on seeing midcentury chairs and adorable knickknacks. The owners and renters of these apartments and houses aren’t rich per se, well at least not in a celebrity way, but their videos suggest that they pride themselves on having good taste. And though they won’t admit it, they want others to think they have good taste too, hence why they share the details of how they’ve gone about arranging the walls and corners of their houses. Step inside one and you’ll find a careful curation of artful furniture and decor. Many of the home dwellers are millennials, but they’ve shied away from the quintessential millennial aesthetic—letter boards, boob planters, bisexual couches—and opted for an interior style they deem sophisticated and timeless. And admittedly, it is easy to agree with them. Take, for instance, Paige Wassel—a prop stylist and YouTuber known for her quippy takes on interior trends. In her most popular videos, she calls out design choices that are, in her eyes, tacky, unnecessary, or simply bad. After dragging these trends extensively, she usually provides alternatives. Some of her advice is wise and practical: don’t place a rug under a dining table, avoid using overhead lighting, and incorporate buzzy trends and styles sparingly. And some of her opinions are more debatable, for example, she dislikes subway tile and the color pink, and encourages viewers to ditch conventional furniture for quaint, vintage pieces that can be reupholstered—a noble idea, but rather pricey for the average person. But generally speaking, money doesn’t seem to be a huge factor in her considerations. 

In her series, Check Out This F***ing Home, Wassel brings viewers into the residences of friends and fellow content creators, most of whom are yuppie-types like herself. From a Spanish-style Los Angeles house to an airy apartment in downtown Bordeaux, each place is undoubtedly unique and enthralling. One could attribute the houses’ beauty to the dwellers’ taste in art and linens, but mostly, what makes these spaces pleasing is the spaces themselves. Some of them have gardens and courtyards, others have floor-to-ceiling windows and wood beams—all distinct qualities that can’t be bought at a vintage shop. And, to a certain extent, Wassel acknowledges this and sometimes even begrudgingly points out her subjects’ luck in finding these homes, but she stops at the idea of luck and doesn’t discuss, for instance, how these homes were found or, better yet, how much they cost. Though money comes up in her other videos, albeit briefly and without much depth, she never talks about it in these tours. While watching her mosey through these kitchens and living rooms, pointing out the lush light, admiring the stylish chairs, I often find myself so distracted by money—the presence of it, the questions it begs. How much do these people pay for rent? Are they in any debt? Did their parents help? Sure, maybe I’m nosey, not owed this information. Yet, with homes as beautiful as these, lived in by people as young as they are, it feels a bit peculiar that there isn’t more discussion about money, or, at the very least, about rent. America’s in a housing crisis after all. 

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Finding somewhere to live is extremely arduous right now, and it is even harder to find an affordable place—both to rent and to buy. In New York, less than 1% of vacant rentals are priced below $2400 a month. In Los Angeles, the average home is listed for $1.2M and usually sold for around $950k. Coastal cities are known to be costly and have been getting excessively expensive for years, but housing prices are skyrocketing in small cities and towns too. Last year, Kansas City experienced “the biggest decline in affordable listings across all the metro areas in the U.S.” And in Dallas, where I grew up, aspiring homeowners must find a way to shelve out $405k, even though the median income is a little under $60k. Yet, despite how pricey housing is all over the country, our incomes are not matching the rising costs of living. According to Timothy Noah of the New Republic, “Between 2001 and 2020 median rents grew 21 percent, after inflation, while renters’ incomes grew 2 percent.” Given this discrepancy between rent and income increases, the rates of homelessness are inevitably rising too. “Between 2015 and 2023 the number of unsheltered homeless increased by 48 percent. If it seems to you that there are a lot more homeless people living in the street, that’s because there are.”

There’s a quote that gets reshared often on leftist social forums. It goes something like: “We’re all closer to being homeless than being billionaires.” The thought being that if you’re a working-class individual who has to toll against the relentless current of American capitalism, you’re more at risk of becoming homeless than joining the ranks of Jeff Bezos and Beyoncé. Last year, Forbes reported that Beyoncé made $579 million after her Renaissance tour. Whereas, the median yearly income in America is around $75,000. And well, it goes without saying that $75k is way closer to the poverty line (currently $15,060) than the pop star’s earnings. Right now, I make $50,000, which is definitely closer to poverty. A scary reality that I still have a tough time wrapping my head around. How is it that despite spending most of my days writing emails, commuting to work, helping board members and stakeholders build their wealth, how it is that despite all the time I waste working, my endless efforts to stay productive aren’t enough to shield me from losing it all? It's haunting. My friends and I joke about it all the time—how broke we are, how sick we are of being broke, and the endless cycle of stress that comes with it. We laugh over drinks, sigh softly on the way home. Some days, the weight of money doesn’t feel so bad. Some days are fast and breezy. A walk in the park, a pasture of sanguinity. And optimism, for a moment easy and possible, flushes my skin like fresh water and springs me through the day. Until, inevitably, reality pinches again. Life is hard, and I know that eradicating the pressures of money and capital would not necessarily smoothen the natural difficulties of living, but what would it be like if something as basic as housing and shelter, were—as they should be—guaranteed? Astra Taylor, an activist and writer of the book, The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart, says it best: 

“Of course, living with uncertainty and risk is nothing new. How should mortal creatures who have spent our long evolution struggling to survive feel but insecure? The precarious and unpredictable nature of life is what helped inspire the ancient Stoics to counsel equanimity and Buddhist thinkers to develop the concept of Zen. A kind of existential insecurity is indelible to being human. [...] But existential insecurity is not my focus here. The ways we structure our societies could make us more secure; the way we structure it now makes us less so. I call this “manufactured insecurity.” Where existential insecurity is an inherent feature of our being— and something I believe we need to accept and learn from—manufactured insecurity facilitates exploitation and profit by waging a near-constant assault on our self-esteem and well-being. [...] Only by reckoning with how deep manufactured insecurity runs will it become possible to envision something different.”

Home tour videos are not political and I don’t think they necessarily should be. But, amid our ever-declining, grueling conditions, it is difficult not to politicize them. It is difficult not to watch celebrities wax poetic about their homes or influencers talk about taste without experiencing a gnawing sense of friction. And honestly, plainly said, it is difficult not to feel like a total piece of shit, endlessly engrossed by envy. But of course, this is effective. It is when I’m stuck in an emotional vat of envy, feeling pitiful and uncool, that I’m most motivated to buy the “right” things, to be a “better consumer,” to thoughtfully (anxiously) invest in products that project an air of stylishness that I can feel proud of and, most importantly, that others can affirm. How convenient for brands and the influencers that promote them! Right now, if you scroll through interior design-related content on YouTube, you’ll find videos like “Bad Interior Trends And What To Do Instead,” and “6 Easy Steps To Find Your Interior Design Style,” and, my personal favorite: “3 Things Making Your House Look Cheap.” Videos like these hinge on the insecurities of viewers and sensationalize, and to an extent even moralize, something that is very subjective and personal: how we make a home. Home tour videos do a similar thing. When Architectural Digest or influencers like Paige Wassel share those stylish, covet-worthy places, they’re exhibiting them as the standard, as another kind of beauty to strive for. They urge us to consider taste and develop an understanding of it beyond our own intimate points of view, or else risk appearing unsophisticated or, even worse, cheap—which maybe really just means poor. 

It’s funny, this collective obsession we have with facades that cast an illusion of elegance and composure despite the pressing nature of the real world: chaos, oppression, poverty. Of all the things to fret about, is the desire to live in the most beautiful home with the most beautiful things really worth the stress if the likelihood of affording even just a good enough place grows slimmer and slimmer by the day? Most of us are closer to being homeless than being billionaires. I think the answer is obvious.