Economists dating back to Aristotle make a distinction between “use value” and “market value.”1 If you maximize use value, your home will steadily become more idiosyncratic and highly adapted over the years. Maximizing market value means becoming episodically more standard, stylish, and inspectable in order to meet the imagined desires of a potential buyer. Seeking to be anybody’s house it becomes nobody’s. Whole neighborhoods tend toward uniformity as everyone avoids being the money-wasting best house on the block or the sore-thumb worst house on the block.
