Earlier this summer, the 12-story Champlain Towers South beachfront condo collapsed in Surfside, Florida. The final death tally stands at 98 people, making it the fourth-deadliest structural failure in American history. While the engineers paraded into press conferences and experts brought onto news channels are quick to dismiss this collapse as an outlier, it is important to ask what forces are at play here, and to wonder if this is a foreshadowing of what is to come. Perhaps this is what happens when we build for economic—instead of human—purposes.

It is no revolutionary claim to say that we find ourselves in an age of consumerism. While it is not the subject of this piece to dive into the abstract economic discussion of free-market versus consumer capitalism, one can look around and quickly come to the conclusion that economic decisions today are usually predicated on desire, not need. In other words, modern American capitalism is governed not by production, but by consumption. How is this done? By planning obsolescence.

In 1932, a real estate broker named Bernard London wrote a now-famous essay entitled "Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence". In it, he outlines a solution to the Great Depression: government-mandated lifespans of consumer products and hefty taxes levied on “continued use of what is legally ‘dead’ ”. While this sounds draconian (I encourage a reading of the entire essay), much of what London was proposing is now standard practice. What was the “solution” for the economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic? At least two stimulus checks, with some folks receiving as many as four. In both cases, the purpose is to incentivize consumption; to have the nation spend its way out of an economic downturn. This is because our economic system has a need for liquidity, the ability to easily convert assets into cash. Planned obsolescence generates these desired economic transactions, which can result in lots of growth. But the problem with this growth is that it comes at the cost of long-term prosperity.

The former First Lady was there to illuminate the plight of the Beaux Arts railway station that once dazzled New Yorkers and was, upon its opening in 1913, considered one of the city’s greatest wonders. Intended by developers to dwarf the nearby Penn Station, Grand Central Terminal cost nearly $160,000,000 (more than $4 billion today) to construct and was a front-page story in the local papers for weeks leading up to opening day. As dependence on rail travel diminished in the mid-20th century, Grand Central’s relevance too was questioned, and in 1963, the top of the station became the base for the tower known as the Pan-Am building, named after the airline headquartered there.

In 1975 a plot was hatched to dwarf the Pan-Am building with an even larger structure designed by famed Modern architect Marcel Breuer, but there was a problem: the sting of Penn Station’s demolition in 1964 was still fresh in the minds of many New Yorkers. In the aftermath of that legendary building’s destruction, Grand Central had been designated a New York City Landmark under a new law that gave the city the power to protect buildings it deemed worthy. When plans for the Breuer addition were presented to the Landmarks Preservation Commission, the response from officials was that the tower was essentially an “aesthetic joke.”

While few doubted the significance of Grand Central, the terminal’s owners took issue with the law itself—how, they wondered, could it constitute anything other than an unreasonable violation of their rights as property owners? Preservationists like Onassis, working with groups like the Municipal Art Society, continued to insist that saving Grand Central and buildings like it wasn’t a mere real estate matter, but an issue of public good. On June 26, 1978, the United States Supreme Court agreed with them in Penn Central Transportation Co. vs. New York City, not just in regards to Grand Central but in the spirit of the Landmarks law itself, with Justice William Brennan writing that to rule in favor of the building’s owners would “invalidate not just New You City’s law, but all comparable landmark legislation elsewhere in the nation.”