Because the top 20 percent of households own almost everything in the United States, it’s easy to get used to the idea of never owning anything. I live in a rent-stabilized apartment in Brooklyn, which means my rent can only go up a certain amount every one or two years and my landlord always has to offer me a lease renewal. (There are all kinds of obscene ways landlords try to get around this, but those are the basic rules.) So, in a way, the apartment is mine, but it’s also definitely not mine. This is the thing about my generation: Nothing is actually ours.
 
I thought about this while reading a piece in The New York Times about a Manhattan couple who dreamed of owning a farm but didn’t know how to, so they bought land and then leased it to a couple who did. The arrangement, which is described in the story by all parties involved in really glowing terms, goes like this:
 
To help an enterprising farmer establish a farm, the couple decided to offer a free 30-year land lease on up to five acres. They also discounted the rent for the farmer’s apartment to $1,100 a month, after determining that area homes of a similar size rented for $1,500 to $1,800.

But the leased land wasn’t farm-ready. The tenant couple had to clear it, dig a well, build cold storage, install a fence and greenhouse, and invest in the soil. In their own assessment, they put their “entire savings—and borrowings—into starting the farm.” That’s a lot to shoulder for land that you have no real claim to beyond the lease.
 
Many Times readers were quick to point out that the story was really just a highly stylized rebranding of tenant farming, a still-widespread practice rooted in the Jim Crow era, in which farmers work from land they don’t own. But because this was all happening in a nice-looking farmhouse, with a gloss of Etsy cuteness over the whole thing, it was understood as something else: a kind of disruption of the farming model or co-working agriculture. As Nick wrote this week, it’s just another face of a familiar labor practice, in which companies and owners shift most of the risk of their ventures onto workers—think of how Uber and Lyft offer no benefits to drivers, who provide their own vehicles and pay for their own gas—while calling it innovation.
 
Those are the blunt economics. But there’s another layer of it all that struck me, which is that it’s easy to see the arrangement as a pretty good deal. It’s a setup that is likely the closest a person without real wealth might come to having a little piece of something, even if it’s only temporary. Better than nothing, right? I also don’t think anyone involved in the venture came into it with bad intent, as if the Manhattan couple woke up one morning and thought they’d just love to deny a tenant farmer family the capacity to build meaningful wealth while collecting rent off their labor. It just kind of happened. A lot of life is like that now: bad incentives and shitty structures that we slot ourselves into because it seems kind of natural. The base inequity feels normal—almost altruistic—because it’s everywhere. You could even call it, as the Times does, living the “dream.”

—Katie McDonough, deputy editor