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December 18, 2024 - 7:00pm
A new real estate platform called Oyssey has discerned what homebuyers really want to know about their future neighbours: whether they’re Republicans or Democrats. The service, which is soft-launching this month in South Florida and New York City, claims to provide detailed block-by-block political data alongside standard housing listings. Buyers can see not just bedroom counts and square footage, but also a heat map showing how their potential neighbours voted and donated in recent elections.
For much of the 20th century, American housing segregation operated through redlining — the systematic denial of mortgages and services to “undesirable” members of minority communities by banks and Government agencies. Real estate agents would steer white buyers away from black neighbourhoods, while restrictive covenants explicitly banned property sales to various ethnic and religious groups. Those practices were eventually outlawed by the Fair Housing Act of 1968, but their demographic effects linger in many of America’s still-segregated cities. Now Oyssey offers a different kind of demographic sorting, one which is both perfectly legal and perhaps even increasingly desired by more politically polarised buyers themselves.
The platform’s CEO Huw Nierenberg has claimed in an interview that this approach reflects how modern house-hunting actually works. Initial concerns about foundation cracks, code violations, and outdated kitchens inevitably give way to subtle questions about the neighbourhood, as buyers attempt to determine whether they’d fit in politically and culturally with the people next door.
This isn’t the first attempt to segment American consumers along political lines. A dating app called The Right Stuff seeks to create a conservatives-only dating pool. The Veebs shopping app promises to help users buy products aligned with their political values. Both services still struggle with clunky interfaces and limited adoption, though each has improved somewhat since I initially wrote about them. Oyssey, with its cleaner design, more limited functions, and integration with existing real estate market data analytics, might succeed where these earlier ventures have stumbled.
The timing feels particularly apt in the wake of Donald Trump’s election victory and corporate America’s ongoing recalibration of its political messaging. Just weeks ago, Bud Light tapped comedian Shane Gillis for an advertisement that seemed designed to win back conservative customers alienated by the brand’s previous partnership with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney. The beer giant’s apparent ideological pivot suggests that America’s major corporations are growing more comfortable with in-your-face partisan targeting.
What makes Oyssey’s approach notable is how it transforms previously implicit housing preferences into explicit data points. While all American neighbourhoods have long sorted themselves along de facto political lines, Oyssey strips away the polite fiction that these divisions happen organically, instead giving homebuyers the tools to deliberately seek out — or avoid — neighbourhoods based on residents’ voting patterns.
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SubscribeThe more expansive the government gets the more political a society will become. The Left thinks every life incident is interdependent (systemic) and therefore political while the Right does not. However the Right is beginning to think more like the Left because the Left’s Hyperawareness of all injustice has largely actualized interdependency as a societal principle and made it a reality.
For the Right, the best way to getting back to a less political society is to live amongst people that don’t think systemically through the prism of victim/oppressor.