When Baking and Real Estate Collide

The DIY food movement that swept America, à la Brooklyn and Portland, never made it to Paris, because Parisians are content to leave making sausages, cheese, and beer; raising chickens; and even baking macarons to the pros. Traditionally in France, people who became bread bakers or worked in butcher shops started working in their trades when they w

We have been trained to view our houses and apartments as private refuges, but they must also be seen for what they are: job sites where millions of dollars of the global economy are directly exchanged.

the small industries of the inner cities were being replaced by artists and the smooth affluence that sometimes follows and imitates artists.

The little shop owner thus shared a common fate with other property owners in the city. It was not a zero-sum game, where one benefits only at the expense of others. I’m not suggesting they all lived in harmony, but they had a lot of selfish incentives for altruism.