Covid Concept Home

An opinion piece by Tressie McMillan Cottom describes a new “Covid concept home” that was unveiled this summer. The home—with its four bedrooms and three-and-a-half bathrooms—is clearly intended for upper middle-class buyers, though it has not yet been priced. The “concept” emerged from a collaboration among three businesswomen in light of an online survey of nearly 7,000 U.S. adults (with household incomes of $50,000+/year). The survey’s purpose was to test “consumer sentiment in light of COVID-19 to understand the design changes consumers want in new homes and communities.”

Those survey results reveal an interesting trend in the expectations of a certain social group about work, school, and home life: “many consumers view the pandemic not as a one-off, but as a harbinger: They will need to work from home in the future.” The Covid concept home is built with this in mind.

There’s a lot of creepy consumerism here. Beyond the details that come out in McMillan Cottom’s description, the online tour of the house reveals stylized décor that romanticizes a simpler time when one could easily travel to distant vacation destinations with children. The kids’ room includes a climbing rope so homeowners will be well-prepared to exercise their children the next time public parks close and kids without backyards or indoor climbing equipment are again relegated to streets and sidewalks and parking lots for their outdoor recreation. These houses are clearly marketed to people who have the means (or hope for the means) to get as much of their skin out of the future pandemic game as possible.

There’s also a lot of creepy gender stuff here. McMillan Cottom describes the builders’ and developers’ attempts to frame the home’s design as feminist and empowering. “But when you peel back the women’s [survey] response to see the expectations underlying them,” she writes, “it does not sound empowering.” Rather, the design reflects the extreme pressures women have borne during the pandemic, and that they seem to presume they will continue to bear, at least intermittently.

Among the home’s design features that reflect women’s added burden of care work during the pandemic, McMillan Cottom notes two “flex spaces” in the home, the obvious function of which is for holding Zoom calls. One has an artful brick wall for backdrop; the other has decorative wallpaper and is located just off the kitchen: Although not explicitly gendered, “this design decision is a response to the idea that mothers need to remain tethered to the kitchen, because the kitchen is the control center of the home. The kitchen is open and gives direct sight lines to another innovation: schooling rooms.”

Yes, that’s right: “The Covid concept home has a built-in home schoolroom, with a Dutch door that allows the mother to be able to see into the room and theoretically supervise the children, while also providing separation so that she can continue to work from both the kitchen and her odd, small, highly decorated, kitchen-adjacent Zoom room.”

This home, says McMillan Cottom, is built for an “extremely retrograde” ideal of mothers tethered to the kitchen. “But now, instead of supervising the home life and the children, being tethered to the kitchen also allows her the ‘flexibility’ to participate in the paid labor market from her closed-in Zoom room.”

The piece builds to an important point: “The Covid concept home demonstrates both the exuberant quality of American consumption — that we can buy our way out of everything — and its limits as a solution. Designing for problems that may seem straightforward in a survey may sound really cool, and may provide you with some really cool features… But the problems posed by Covid can’t really be solved at the level of the household. These are structural, collective problems: politically and culturally, economically and spiritually. A concept house for our post-Covid reality probably needs to look more like dense, accessible, affordable housing so that women can untether themselves from the control center of their homes, and instead just enjoy a simple cup of coffee in the kitchen.”

I think she’s right that these are structural problems and that we need dense, accessible housing instead of this Covid concept home. But I was struck by a parallel that goes unnoted.

Given the gendered social norms that explain why women have been so burdened during the pandemic, attempts to idealize housing that brings those burdens closer together in domestic space as a feminist solution is simply crass. That’s in part because consumer choice is a solution only for a privileged few. Another problem with the thought that the Covid concept home is feminist and empowering is that making women’s unjust burden easier to carry doesn’t remove the unfairness. But that description—making women’s unjust burden easier to carry without removing the unfairness—doesn’t apply only to the Covid concept house. Lots of social policy that the left endorses does exactly the same thing. For example, just like the Covid concept house, subsidized childcare makes it easier to be a working parent. But it doesn’t eliminate the costs of parenting—nor should it. And, so long as parenting imposes costs in terms of work and the many other projects adults might like to pursue alongside parenting, and so long as women do more of the parenting, women will be disproportionally set back in those other projects. Arguably, so long as women are disproportionally set back, the unfairness remains.

This is not to say that subsidized childcare and the Covid concept house are analogous in all morally relevant respects. For one thing, there’s a difference in the degree to which the burden is lessened. A more important difference is that subsidized childcare eases the burden even for those who can’t afford gendered home offices and a built-in schoolroom. But the fact that both subsidized childcare and the concept house arguably leave gender unfairness intact suggests that, while McMillan Cottom is surely right that “the problems posed by Covid can’t really be solved at the level of the household,” they can’t be solved absent household changes, either. We ask too much of women caregivers, and part of that problem is that it’s too hard to provide care while also doing all the other things that women need and want to do. But another part of the problem survives the lessening of those burdens. We ask too much of women caregivers because so many—women included—still expect women to do the caregiving when the caregiving imposes costs at work and at play. And that can be solved only if we get everyone—men included—to value and insist on men doing caregiving.

Middle class housing shouldn’t look like this. But it will, for now. Within that context, and if consumers’ predictions about future pandemics are right, the kitchen zoom room isn’t such an abomination. We just need more men zooming from the kitchen and more women zooming from the upstairs quiet. And, even as we desperately need subsidized childcare, we also need more men staying home with the sniffling kid while they wait for that Covid test to come back negative.