This New Yorker profile of Mark Ellison, a brilliant carpenter who constructs some of the most incredible homes in the city, quietly captures the sad reality of life in “superstar” cities. Ellison works on truly incredible homes built for the incomprehensibly wealthy class of people for whom a home in Manhattan — one of several they float and flit between — is a mere lifestyle choice.

Ellison himself doesn’t live in the city but an abandoned fire station 60 miles north on the Hudson because there’s nowhere for someone with decades of experience in a trade to actually hang his hat. Even a generation ago there would be small, if shrinking, pockets for people who actually work for a living to, well, live in the city; now they’ve all been consumed by a real estate industry fully overtaken by finance (to say nothing of the actual titans of tech and finance themselves).

I suspect the post-vaccine recovery will only continue and exacerbate this trend to the point that major cities will be unlivable by anyone but the wealthy.