Why does housing in America feel so unattainable—and why does it seem designed that way? In this sweeping opening chapter of Built to Divide, host Dimitrius Lynch traces the origins of today’s housing affordability crisis back more than 100,000 years, revealing how our primal instincts around territory, ownership, and status have been shaped—and exploited—over millennia.

From the campfire rituals of early humans to feudal Europe’s enclosures, from the rise of divine kingship to the first mortgage systems, and from the U.S. labor movement to the FHA’s propaganda-style push for suburban homeownership, this episode exposes how housing evolved from a shared human necessity to a powerful engine of inequality.

Lynch weaves anthropology, architecture, public health data, urban history, and political economy into a gripping narrative that shows how today’s housing insecurity, record-high rents, soaring home prices, and widening inequality were not an accident. They were engineered—over centuries—through policies, incentives, and cultural stories built to divide us.

Listeners will learn how the built environment reflects our deepest psychological wiring, how financialization transformed shelter into a commodity, how zoning and mortgages reshaped American life, and why housing policy is inseparable from health, safety, democracy, and collective well-being.

This cinematic episode sets the foundation for the entire series, revealing a simple but radical truth: the world we live in was designed—and can be redesigned.

Episode Extras - Photos, videos, sources and links to additional content found during research.

Episode Credits:

Production in collaboration with Gābl Media

Written & Executive Produced by Dimitrius Lynch

Audio Engineering and Sound Design by Jeff Alvarez

Affordability is a major barrier for first-time buyers in July the median national sale

price hovered near a record high almost four hundred thousand dollars a recent Harvard

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University study found that median potential buyers are deterred by high mortgage rates

and anxiety about the economy So was the US facing a housing affordability crisis?

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Not only were we

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under building for a decade, but then you get to the pandemic and there's this massive

rush on housing.

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That's making home prices rise fast.

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of rent is really through the roof.

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Residential rents across the country went up an average of 15 % last year, nearly twice

the overall inflation rate.

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That's particularly painful for tenants.

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Homelessness in America.

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According to a Washington Post article, shelters across the country are reporting an

increase in numbers of people looking for help.

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Since 2021, housing costs have abnormally climbed to record highs, outrunning the average

paycheck.

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Maybe you've heard a dozen explanations.

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Here's the harder truth.

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This didn't just happen.

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Now, you've likely heard the saying, there's strength in numbers.

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I'd like you to consider the possibility that over time our housing system has actually

been manufactured to keep people separate, generating profits for a few at the expense of

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a strong civil society.

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Today's income inequality and lack of housing affordability are the predictable

consequences of rules and incentives stacked over centuries in pursuit of two things,

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money and power.

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that system's favorite accelerant to reach that end?

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Division.

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Federal Housing Administration, or FHA, working with Path News produced a series of

government-sponsored shorts to show how President Franklin D.

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Roosevelt's New Deal policies were building homes and putting people to work in the

process.

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In the 1935 reel you're listening to, Better Housing News Flashes Number 3, the camera

glides across the crown of the New York skyline.

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tilts down to reveal a two-story single-family cottage tucked between Manhattan's soaring

office towers.

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The FHA built the home as an interactive billboard for home ownership, a stage set to sell

the ordinary rhythms, promises, and benefits of having a home of your own.

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Nestled among the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan stands a little white clapboard

cottage, a symbol of calm and peaceful country life on one of New York's busiest

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thoroughfares.

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This pygmy among the giants is not the whim of an eccentric millionaire.

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It is placed in its unusual location to acquaint busy New Yorkers with what is new in

small house construction and decoration.

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To the many who visit it daily, it brings a lifelike picture of the benefits to themselves

and their families of a quiet place in the country.

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It exposes the busy businessman who inspects it at lunch hour to the influence of a

charming resident such as he, my dog.

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All is serene in the model home living room, though traffic roars outside.

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When visitors pass through each of its delightfully furnished rooms, they are impressed

again and again by the air of peaceful comfort and efficiency that pervade.

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The modern kitchen is a revelation to housewives.

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And the tiled laundry is a dream of domestic efficiency.

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Inside and out, this little house is a model of charm and beauty.

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It is the silent salesman for better housing.

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A suggestion for the house that you may build under a National Housing Act insured

mortgage.

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On his face, the message was sensible.

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See, for humans, shelter is not optional.

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Without it, extreme heat or cold can turn deadly in hours.

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Shelter is the bedrock of survival and the platform for everything else.

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But there's more than just having a roof over your head.

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A home is where you reset, think without intrusion, make habits stick, share a table, and

anchor yourself in a neighborhood.

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A home

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especially one you can comfortably manage, offers the stability and self-determination

that help people not just survive, but thrive.

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And yet, look at where we are now.

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On a single night in 2024, nearly 800,000 people in the United States were unhoused.

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That year, landlords filed eviction cases at rates of 7.3 to 7.8%.

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with tens of thousands evicted per city tracked by Eviction Lab, a major repository of

national eviction filings and research.

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For most Americans, housing is the largest expense on a monthly budget.

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A general rule of thumb is to not spend more than 30 % of your gross monthly income on

housing.

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A red line to avoid is 50 % because it limits financial flexibility.

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Per the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University's annual report, The State

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housing costs burdened, spending more than 30 % of their income on housing.

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83 % of them earned less than $30,000 annually, and 67 % of those were severely burdened,

having just $250,000

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$50 to cover remaining basic needs after monthly rent.

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For homeowners, nearly a quarter were cost burdened too.

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Now it's not a stretch to connect housing insecurity to wider harms, mental health strain,

avoidable illness, and early death, overloaded emergency rooms, disrupted childhoods,

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exposure to violence, frayed trusts, and an era that feels more isolating and divisive by

the day.

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In fact, research now connects the dots.

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, unemployment soared to 15 % and work hours and wages fell.

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Those experiencing financial difficulties understandably had increased anxiety and

depression risk.

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A study found that in states that temporarily blocked evictions or foreclosures, the

probability of anxiety and depression among renters reduced by 2.7%.

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to 5.7 % and 2.3 to 5.3 % among homeowners.

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Eviction itself is linked to a rise in depression and anxiety.

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Children who experience housing instability show more behavioral problems and lower

academic performance.

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Neighborhoods with higher eviction rates see more burglaries and homicides as trusts and

eyes on the street erode.

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And people without stable housing face sharply higher risks of illness and early death.

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In other words, housing policy is health policy, safety policy, and education policy.

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And the costs of instability ripple far beyond any one household.

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So yes, promoting housing makes sense.

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The problem, however, was the motive.

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How we designed our homes and the ecosystem that came with them.

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Films like Better Housing News Flashes followed a longer lineage of persuasion that began

with the nationwide own your own home campaign.

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The effort started inside the National Association of Real Estate Boards, known today as

National Association of Realtors, and was backed by allied industry groups to spur

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investment, construction, and sales in private housing.

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At the time,

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The U.S.

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government was concerned with domestic economic anxiety and the spread of communism.

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After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, a coup that seized power from the provisional

government in Russia, federal support for private housing began to take shape, partly as

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an anti-communist response.

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In addition, the politics of the time perceived that renting implied dependence on a

landlord's favor.

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Homeownership signaled independence,

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a system much more in line with democracy and capitalism.

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Following World War I, growing labor unrest, instability, and the loom of communism

prompted the U.S.

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Department of Labor to quickly adopt and nationalize the Own Your Own Home campaign.

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The Labor Department went on to sponsor lectures, circulated posters, and pamphlets

explaining how to get a home loan, and even handed out We Own Our Own Home campaign

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buttons to schoolchildren.

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Industry and government also framed home ownership as a growth engine.

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But through that lens, the people can slip behind profit and power and choices about what

to build and for whom don't always serve the public good.

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Over time, the market, backed by an increasingly financialized system, sold a never enough

version of home.

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Bigger houses, more rooms, more things to fill them, simultaneously pulling us from our

humanity.

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The loop is familiar.

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Buy larger, buy more.

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Grow anxious about protecting it.

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Retreat behind gates, turn inward from neighbors.

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chase the next upgrade as satisfaction receipts.

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That commercial and political investment helped set the stage for the post-war surge in

home ownership.

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The era often mythologized as idyllic.

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A cottage, a white picket fence, two and a half kids.

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That image of prosperity was ironically the carrot that led us toward the inequality and

lack of housing affordability we contend with today.

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But again,

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Beneath that image is a harder truth, one we need to face clearly if we want a different

future than the one we're barreling towards now.

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I'm Demetrius Lynch, and this is Built to Divide.

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You're in or you're out.

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And the architecture reflects it, social customs, relations with people, everything from

time and space are the two basic organizing systems of life.

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The fighting and the concrete issues of the war are so removed from our country that not

all of our citizens have a full understanding of the principles of autocratic force which

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the central...

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our desire to substitute for the real principles of freedom.

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As an architect, I hear lot of explanations for why housing feels unattainable.

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Our job as professionals is to separate fact from fiction and help the public push for

solutions that last.

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As individuals, it can be hard to see what one person can do, but we have more power than

we think.

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Power that grows through our citizenship, community, and collective action.

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When we avoid the full scope and depth of the problem,

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Real solutions stay out of reach.

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This series traces how our housing system has evolved and how it was, at key moments,

engineered to divide us.

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We'll follow the people, organizations, and movements that shaped it, how the built world

and its professionals adapted, the risks ahead, and the myths that keep pulling us away

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from lasting answers.

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Along the way, we'll keep the subtext front and center

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how income inequality threads through the story, turning shelter, a basic human need, into

a sorting mechanism.

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Today, we begin at the beginning, humans earliest approach to shelter, why it matters so

deeply, and how our understanding of its purpose shifted from common good to private

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asset, from a place to live to a thing to leverage.

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And we'll get into all of that after this break.

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Episode 1, Proximics and Personal Space.

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It's around 100,000 years ago.

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A hunter steps into the circle, grinning, dragging an antelope hunch.

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He boasts about his prize.

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Around the fire, elders chuckle.

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In many small mobile vans, bragging and hoarding didn't fly.

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Anthropologists call this leveling.

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If you took too much, the group insulted the meat.

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A barrage of jokes flowed to puncture your pride and encourage you to put the food back

into the circle.

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Refused to share?

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People stop sharing with you.

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Keep pushing?

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The camp moves on without you.

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That simple ritual says a lot about who we are at a primitive, instinctual level.

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From early hominids, sheltering in trees, to hunter-gatherers building single large huts

for the group, humans have been a profoundly communal and cooperative species.

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That's not to say there wasn't conflict with outside groups over resources.

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But sharing wasn't utopia.

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It was practical.

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With food insecurity,

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and constant movement, stockpiling had limits.

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But at the same time, evolution rewarded those who could secure resources, defend space,

and kept their kin safe.

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Our brains actually still carry that wiring.

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Territorial alarms in the limbic system, defensive reflexes when personal or communal

space is threatened.

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Territoriality, course, is basic to

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all organisms.

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It's not as odd as incidentally.

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I mean, in a sense, you have to almost forget about Audrey, because it's incredibly

complex phenomenon, it performs many, different functions with different species.

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This is Edward T.

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Hall, an anthropologist and cross-cultural researcher known for developing the concepts of

proxemics.

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He argued that territoriality is deeply ingrained in human psychology, influencing urban

design, housing preferences, and social interactions.

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He's stated that, quote, man's need for territoriality and space is as vital as his need

for food and shelter.

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He explains that humans have zones of territoriality or how physically close someone can

get to you before you become uncomfortable.

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Now in the U.S.

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we have four zones.

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In parts, at least parts of India, I don't know about all of India, have two.

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Inimate and public.

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You're in or you're out.

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And the architecture reflects it.

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Social customs, relations with people, everything from...

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mean, time and space are the two basic organizing systems of life.

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After that you get social organization, social structure and whatnot, but every activity

is organized in some way in time and space.

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These are the core life systems.

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So we have four.

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In them.

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This is social consultative distance, some more professional kind.

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In hospitals, the nurses will talk about the foot of the bed doctor and beside the bed

doctor.

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This is the distance that the foot of the bed doctor uses, and this is the distance

besides the bed doctor uses.

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And they are two entirely different kinds of doctors.

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One of them is interested in the patient, the other is interested in his condition.

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And when I'm talking to medical audiences, I advise them very strongly if they're one, for

gosh sakes, don't change or try to change because they will goof it up.

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mean, they're dealing again with a total system here and a foot of the bed doctor tries to

be beside the bed doctor.

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He's not going to behave right.

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And here we have all four.

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The folks on the beach, you see, are separated by public distances and then you have

intimate personal self-attitude sector.

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Territorial zones are the basis for our relationship with others and our connection to

space.

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The result is a tension

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at the core of human life.

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We are both built to share with some and built to guard from others.

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This instinctual behavior is ultimately what has made society susceptible to an evolving

message around our relationship with land.

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When the last Ice Age eased, that tension at the core of human life found a new stage.

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People in places like the Natufian settlements along the eastern Mediterranean began to

stay in place.

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Villages of 10 to 20 foot diameter circular huts appeared.

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Granaries held the harvest, sedentary life brought surplus, and surplus and expanding

communities brought coordination problems.

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Canals to dig, walls to raise, grain to store, disputes to settle, armies to field.

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Jokes by the fire weren't enough anymore to referee who got what or why.

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Archaeologists observed that around 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, artifacts such as cave

art, beads, pigment use, symbolic objects, complex tools, and more widespread exchange

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appeared more frequently, signaling an evolution to symbolic thinking and culture.

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To keep strangers cooperating, groups needed reasons bigger than any one family.

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Ecology, demography, social structures, material conditions, constraints, and possibly the

most potent, a story that could make floods, harvests, and justice feel predictable.

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Temples rose beside granaries.

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Priests who watched the stars set planting calendars and settled disputes before the gods.

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Offerings hardened into dues and oaths sworn to unseen witnesses carried more weight than

any handshake.

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Once the sacred ran the calendar, the storehouse and the court, the strongest human voice

in that system, the ruler, could claim to speak for the gods and soon to embody them.

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Across early states, rulers wrapped authority in the sacred.

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The god-king, child of the gods, or heaven's delegate.

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Rituals cast him as the one who keeps floods on time and crops returning.

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Taxis became a duty.

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Obedience a kind of piety.

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Descent a threat to the order of the world.

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Divine kingship wasn't just theater.

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It was a technology of coordination and control.

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answering the farmer's blunt question, why should I bring you my grain with because the

balance of the universe depends on it.

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That divine authority set in motion a transition to the concept of ownership, an evolution

from our relationship to the land, from access and use of the tribe or village to land

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that belonged to the gods ruled by the God King.

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As agricultural settlement communities,

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The more we invested in fields and irrigation, the tighter our relationship to land

became.

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The more our instinct to guard emerged.

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And through ranked systems, elites held privileges by trade and politics.

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In that world, your plot wasn't just an asset, it was a duty.

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Over centuries, those privileges hardened.

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Land, surplus crops, and favors could be traded, pledged, and inherited.

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Hierarchies thickened.

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In medieval Europe, the dominant model was feudal, land tied to service, trade, and

protection.

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Much of the countryside remained a patchwork of commons, open fields and pastures used

collectively, hedged by seasonal rules and neighborly enforcement.

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In that context, the village still remembered the fire.

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Then slowly, the rules changed again.

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Beginning in England, enclosure, the fencing and legal partition of common lands, turned

shared fields into exclusive plots.

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First to expand pastures for wool, later in the 18th and 19th centuries to rationalize

agriculture, enclosure replaced trade with title.

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Where the commons had a balanced private need with mutual rights, enclosure said,

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This is mine to use, exclude, improve, or profit from as I see fit.

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For many peasants, it meant loss of grazing, fuel, or sustenance plots, and a push towards

wage labor and the growing towns.

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The fire became a fence.

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As control over land shifted, so did money.

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Similarly to today, a cash-short earl could raise money by leveraging their property

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in various ways with a merchant.

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If the money is not paid back as agreed, the creditor can seize profits from the land.

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But for centuries, Europe argued with itself about the idea of interest.

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Medieval canon law called it usury.

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Many Christian authorities restricted lending at interest because they saw it as

theologically uncharitable, philosophically unnatural, and socially dangerous to the

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common good.

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So, kings capped or banned it.

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But trade didn't stop, and towns and nobles still needed credit, so they developed a

workaround.

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Following the persecution and exile of Jewish people from the present-day Israel, Jews in

Europe encountered restrictions on other livelihoods, frequently barred from guilds,

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landholding, and many offices.

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Permitted options were trade,

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physician scholar, craftsman, farmer, and lender.

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The lending institutions, historically labeled as Jewish money lenders, were essential in

providing services of small loans or pawnbroking to townspeople and artisans and larger

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loans to nobles and the crown.

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There was also a loophole for monarchs to exploit.

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Not restricted through Christian theology, interest was permitted.

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These institutions were taxed and rates and remedies were set by local law.

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A notable lender that would later emerge from this system was Mayor Amschel Rothschild, a

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banking dynasty.

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The Rothschilds, one of the most influential financial families in Europe, would go on to

have a front row seat for the development and expansion of the financial system we know

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today.

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Mayor's five sons, a lead

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innovative bankers of their day expanded the family's financial empire across several

countries, building a Europe-wide network that financed a variety of projects, including

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infrastructure, war efforts, insurance, real estate, and energy to name a few.

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There were also other lending options through the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

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Italian merchant bankers, religious houses, rich merchants and guilds,

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and later London Shriveners, Goldsmith bankers, and country banks.

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Italian banking houses invented the Bill of Exchange, a clever IOU system that moved money

across borders and time without saying interest out loud.

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Over the 1500s, the law and theology bent.

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England legalized lending at cap-to-rates.

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John Calvin, a Protestant reformer, argued that reasonable interest could be moral.

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Then the normalization of credit, from forbidden usury to everyday mortgages, and the

fusion of finance with state power made modern growth possible.

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But it would also ultimately financialize basic needs like housing.

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Meanwhile, an insatiable desire for more fueled dreams of expansion.

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In 1694, Parliament chartered the Bank of England to fund war against France.

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Public debt, bond markets, and a central bank, the financial revolution, became the engine

of the modern state.

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Major banking houses were founded and expanded throughout Europe and the United States.

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Financing the expansion of empires became big business.

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Land and credit were now twin pillars of power.

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By the 18th and 19th centuries, the Industrial Revolution pulled millions toward factory

towns and port cities throughout Europe and the United States.

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Populations swelled behind an immigration boom.

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In many urban districts, most people rented.

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In some neighborhoods, nine out of 10 households did.

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Wealthy families lived in townhouses or grand apartments while working families found

themselves in row houses.

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that were dissected up into many units.

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Walls went up, floors piled on, rear yard extensions overcrowded the lots.

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Tenements, thrown up fast with cheap materials, often lacked indoor plumbing, light, and

ventilation.

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Housing, like land before it, became a sorting machine.

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Reform currents ran alongside the squalor.

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In Britain,

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towns began banning cellar dwellings in the 1840s and over decades cleared the worst

slums.

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In the United States, Jacob Rees, a police reporter turned photographer, illuminated dire

conditions in New York during the Gilded Age with his book, How the Other Half Lives,

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shocking readers with insight into the most densely populated city in America.

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In the book, Rees wrote, quote,

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Every man's experience ought to be worth something to the community from which he drew it,

no matter what that experience may be." The image's prodded officials like thin police

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commissioner Theodore Roosevelt towards change.

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As commissioner and then governor, Theodore Roosevelt walked past sweatshops, tenements,

and child labor he could smell, not just read about.

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When he became president in 1901,

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He carried that city's grit into the White House and reframed power as a promise.

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The Square Deal, a fair shot for workers, consumers, and honest enterprise.

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He used the Sherman Act like a crowbar, cracking the Northern Securities Railroad trusts

and hauling mail factors of great wealth into court.

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Not to punish size, but to stop rigged markets.

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He faced down the 1902 coal strike

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forcing arbitration so the country wouldn't freeze and miners wouldn't starve.

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A first for a president who treated labor as part of the public, not a problem to be

crushed.

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He built the Department of Commerce and Labor to pry open corporate books, passed the

Hepburn Act so railroads couldn't gouge, and after The Jungle, a book that exposed the

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cruel conditions of the powerless in meatpacking plants, shocked the nation pushing

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the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act to protect families at the table.

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Even his conservation crusade, 230 million acres of National Forests, Parks, Monuments

reserved for everyone, was an anti-plunder policy, reserving commonwealth from private

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extraction.

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Roosevelt didn't end inequality, but he changed the wind, proving a presidency could curb

concentrated power and widen the circle of who the economy is for.

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In a message to Congress in January 1908, calling for passage of new labor laws, Roosevelt

said, Predatory wealth of the wealth accumulated on a giant scale by all forms of iniquity

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ranging from the oppression of wage workers to unfair and unwholesome methods of crushing

out competition and to defrauding the public by stock-jobbing and the manipulation of

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securities.

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Certain wealthy men of this stamp whose conduct should be abhorrent to every man of

ordinarily decent conscience and who commit the hideous wrong of teaching our young men

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that phenomenal business success

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must ordinarily be based on dishonesty, have during the last few months made it apparent

that they have banded together to work for a reaction.

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Their endeavor is to overthrow and discredit all who honestly administer the law, to

prevent any additional legislation which would check and restrain them, and to secure, if

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possible, a freedom from all restraint which will permit every unscrupulous wrongdoer

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to do what he wishes unchecked, provided he has enough money.

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The methods by which the standard oil people and those engaged in the other combinations

of which I have spoken above have achieved great fortunes can only be justified by the

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advocacy of a system of morality, which would also justify every form of criminality on

the part of a labor union and every form of violence, corruption and fraud.

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from murder to bribery and ballot box stuffing in politics.

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On the ground, Samuel Gompers, a British-born American cigar maker and labor union leader,

became a key figure in American labor history and the voice of labor's conscience.

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Gompers built the American Federation of Labor from the belief that dignity began with a

fair wage and a shorter day.

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To him, progress wasn't born from ideology.

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It was won through organization and collective bargaining.

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one contract at a time.

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Standing before a crowd of 25,000 unemployed workers in 1893, as the nation sank into

depression, he demanded to know why wealth sat idle in banks while workers wandered

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homeless through city streets.

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As reported in the Chicago Tribune, compers thundered against the controllers of capital

and the titans of industry and finance.

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Why should the wealth of the country be stored in banks and elevators?

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While the idle workmen wander homeless about the streets, and the idle loafers who hoard

the gold only to spend it on riotous living are rolling about in fine carriages from which

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they look out on peaceful meetings and call them riots?

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In print, he communicated, when workers' wages are reduced, they necessarily use less,

consume less, because of their reduced purchasing power.

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Only those who ignorantly or grabbingly believe in their avarice, that business can

prosper.

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With wage reductions, have yet to learn the lesson of industrial life and progress.

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Gomper's rejected the rhetoric of revolution.

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He distrusted socialism's promise and instead forged an economic unionism that sought

cooperation over class war, an alliance between skilled labor and capitalism that might

329

humanize industry from within.

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His approach was a pragmatist rebellion, disciplined, incremental, rooted in the daily

lives of working families who wanted not utopia, but stability.

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a home, a table, and an education for their children.

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In a nation reshaped by monopolies and mechanization, Gompers pushed to give the laborer a

seat at the table, and with it, the idea that democracy must also exist in the workplace.

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Later in 1918, Gompers exemplified that idea during a war bond drive for World War I in

his speech known as Laborers Service to Freedom.

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fellow countrymen, our republic, our people are at war.

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Whatever individuals may have thought upon the European situation before the Congress of

the United States declared war against the Imperial German and Austrian governments, that

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must now be laid aside.

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War means victory for our cause or danger to the very existence

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of our nation.

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The world war in which we are engaged is on such a tremendous scale that we must readjust

practically the whole nation's social and economic structure from a peace to a war basis.

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It devolves upon liberty-loving citizens and particularly the workers of this country to

see to it the

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The and the methods of democracy are maintained within our own country while we are

engaged in a war to establish them in international relations.

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The fighting and the concrete issues of the war are so removed from our country that not

all of our citizens have a full understanding of the principles of autocratic force.

343

which the central powers desire to substitute for the real principles of freedom.

344

In the design world, grand plans hope to inspire better living environments for society.

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In 1898, Ebenezer Howard sketched the Garden City, planned towns with green belts and

mixed incomes, a humane alternative to overcrowded cores that later inspired suburbia,

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which I know has its issues that we'll get to later.

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In the marketplace, mortgage lending matured.

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Banks and building societies offered structured loans that allowed parts of the middle

class to buy homes.

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Property became, more than ever, a financial project.

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Inequality still tracked land.

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Who owned it, who borrowed against it, who paid rent to it.

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But the lens was shifting.

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A house could be shelter, status, and a balance sheet all at once.

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An idea that didn't sit well with some.

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Karl Marx critiqued the way capital turns land and labor into commodities, predicting a

recurrent housing crisis as part of broader inequality.

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Henry George blamed rising urban land values for social ills and proposed a land value tax

to curb speculation and spread the benefits of growth.

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Their debates echo into today's fights over property taxes, zoning, and who owns the city.

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Beneath these policies and projects sits something psychological we all recognize.

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Hedonic adaptation.

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Humans acclimate to more and then want more again.

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Social comparison.

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Humans size ourselves against neighbors.

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Houses become status signals.

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Law separation.

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Humans fear losing what we have more than we value equivalent gains.

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So we guard, hoard,

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and sometimes wall ourselves off.

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Feed those instincts with exclusive titles, enclosures, and cheap credit, and you get a

loop the old campfire would have roasted.

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Buy bigger, fill it with more, grow anxious about protecting it, retreat behind gates,

turn inward from neighbors, and chase the next upgrade as satisfaction keeps receding.

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In this series, we'll explore how society has been built to divide, how property lines

drew invisible walls between neighbors, how the ideal of a home for every nuclear family

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splintered families into isolated units, how zoning laws and gated communities fractured

shared life, and how McMansions, each child tucked away in their own bedroom suite,

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trained us to live apart.

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Together, these forces prepared us for today's lonely virtual realities where

radicalization, extremism, and our growing inability to cooperate have taken root.

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But that's not the scary part.

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That division is ultimately the foundation for a new system that is now attempting to

establish itself before our eyes.

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One centered on the servitude of a CEO monarchy that rules through the ownership of

everything.

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the entire supply chain of modern living.

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We'll explore how we got here and how that plan is being executed today.

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Today we discussed how we began with leveling rituals that checked greed, built

institutions and sacred states to channel grain and labor, rewrote land from use and

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custom to exclusive title, fencing out the commons, normalized credit and bound it to the

state, then extended it into the home, layered on industry, speculation, and status until

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today's housing logic took shape.

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We also built counter systems,

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Defended commons, urban reforms, garden city ideals, and calls to tax land values.

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A reminder that the rules that made this world were written by people and can be

rewritten.

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But for now in this story, by the early 20th century, a pattern was set ripe for the rules

to change again.

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And we'll examine the impacts of mass mortgages, the emergence of zoning laws, and the

view from above.

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pulling the thread of manufactured inequality during the turn of the 20th century.

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Next time on Built to Divide.

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For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our

non-slaveholding Confederate states with reference to the subject of African slavery.

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Nations are perplexed and worried, this cousin in much trouble.

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We're tied upside down, the eagle are running around, the United States need proud,

everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.

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Hey, hey, hey!

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Thanks for listening.

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Built to Divide is presented by Lines, my architecture and creative studio.

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This podcast is produced in collaboration with Gable Media.

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If you enjoyed the show, please tell a friend and rate and review it on Apple Podcasts and

Spotify.

397

It really helps others find it.

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And if you're looking for similar content, Built to Divide is part of the Gable Media

Network, where you can find even more like this.

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Visit gablemedia.com, that's G-A-B-L, media.com.

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And before I go, if you want to see additional photos, video clips, and content that went

into this episode, you can visit me at lines.studio slash podcasts.

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Talk soon.

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He invites you to visit the President's house and see some of the restorations she's made

in its interior.

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I'm Charles Collingwood.

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once wrote, the White House is the property of the nation and so far it is compatible with

living therein.

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It should be kept

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such buildings which keep alive our sense of continuity with the nation's Our nation's

past is reflected in a small part by the history of the walls of the White House.

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