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 Initial concerns about foundation cracks, code violations, and outdated kitchens inevitably give way to subtle questions about the neighbourhood, as buyers attempt to determine whether they’d fit in politically and culturally with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.
Exactly! The “Everything is political” mantra – so beloved of the Left – only reveals the totalitarian subtext inherent to it: when no concern can be left outside the scope of politics, it definitely twharts freedom of speech and action.
Hence the so-called “anti-Facist” Left (but hardly ever “anti-totaliarian”…
Although the elite on the Left look down their noses at the poorer, rural areas of ‘flyover country,’ it is exactly these areas that integrate to a far greater extent than Martha’s Vineyard or the Hamptons.
When one barely has enough money to feed their family, pay the mortgage, live in a safe area with decent schools, and put a little away for retirement, one generally doesn’t have enough money – nor time – to worry about the political leanings of their neighbors, nor their neighbors’ scores on some Ivy League-approved intersectionality grid.
Everyone in these neighborhoods has more in common than time to worry about the issues that divide them.
Such divisive navel-gazing is best left to those with too much time and money who live in ivory towers and wealthy enclaves.
This is exactly the lack of understanding that caused Hillary Clinton to lose her presidential race … she thought everyone in small-town America was as insular as she and her rich friends are. Turns out that many small-town Democrats and Independents, as well as Republicans, don’t take well to elite political outsiders with deep-seated small-minded provincial views proclaiming that half their town’s population is made up of irredeemable “deplorables” and “Nazis.”
This should have been obvious to Hillary … and yet ….
There are huge transaction costs to moving. This service might be useful in narrowing down neighborhoods, but politics would be only one factor in an ultimate house purchase
“The capitalists will sell us the rope from which we will hang them” – Vladimir Lenin.
I can’t help but notice that in the ever-more short term desire to generate a profit, American culture especially seems determined to do anything-and-everything to polarise itself and fray the societal bonds that hold it together for the sake of a quick buck. Whether this business succeeds or not is largely immaterial to the more concerning matter it reveals about the unhealthy state of society in the USA, that enough people think the mere possibly of just living next door to somebody with different politics is unconscionable.
But in fact Lenin used the rope to hang his fellow revolutionaries. The capitalists just keep on making rope.
Social cohesion has been lost because of diversity. As the majority demographic shrinks, factions will grow. There will be no prevailing culture beyond consumerism. Somalis in Minnesota, Muslims in Michigan; it’s not just left vs right, this is a natural result of migration.
First, forced integration, now even more diversity, also forced.
“Yet Oyssey’s innovation isn’t really about creating these divisions: like many other Silicon Valley innovations such as social media, it is about monetising them.”
But the relationship between ‘creating these divisions’ and ‘monetising them’ is not so clear cut. If you can make money from pre-existing divisions, you can perhaps make more money from more divisions. So the companies and the systems they create thrive by exacerbating the divisions.
I half suspect that this effort is just too late to succeed. Everyone’s exhausted with this s**t. Even my own siblings, both of whom bragged about finding anti-Trump neighborhoods to buy in, have stopped spitting whenever Trump is mentioned.