The Cardboard Castles of the Exurbs: When Housing Becomes Just Another Commodity (And Loses All Meaning)

Defining the Commodity and Exurban Uniformity

What is a commodity? The textbook definition goes something like this: “A product is a commodity when all units of production are identical, regardless of who produces them.” Think oil, wheat, gold… interchangeable, fungible, indistinguishable. Now, apply that definition to… housing. Sounds absurd, right? Houses are supposed to be homes, unique reflections of individual needs, tastes, and lives. But consider the exurbs, those sprawling fringes of American cities, mile after mile of… sameness. House after house, practically carbon copies of each other. Identical designs, often chosen from a limited catalog of pre-approved models. Identical lot sizes, meticulously subdivided to ensure maximum… uniformity. Even the street layouts are often interchangeable, looping cul-de-sacs and grid-like patterns designed for maximum… efficiency of identical house placement. They even share the same genericized outlet onto the nearest highway, the umbilical cord connecting this manufactured homogeneity to the wider world. Every effort, in exurban development, seems deliberately engineered to commodify housing, to strip away any semblance of uniqueness, to create units that are as interchangeable and predictable as… well, commodities. But is housing really just a commodity? Should it be treated as such? And what happens to the very idea of home, of place, of value, when we churn out “houses” like widgets on a suburban assembly line?