Can there be a more shallow criticism of a project than the color of the skin of people in a render? I can't imagine one but surely a tech journalist will surprise me.

And more to the point, not every community has to be for everyone. People have started revolutions and waged brutal civil wars to this point. Buying some land and perhaps, maybe excluding someone has to be the most peaceful expression of that drive. Really, who wouldn't want to exclude dregs of society, like tech journalists, from their community. Even dang sometimes bans someone.

Why does every piece of marketing material need to match the racial distribution of the overall country?

Justin Phillips the author of this column is not a serious thinker. This piece, for example, cites a hodgepodge of unrelated facts and seems to blame the tech industry writ large for: redlining, neighborhood downzoning, white flight, and gentrification. All of these phenomenon were part of the American city half a century ago. He also seems to struggle with teasing apart disparate impact and unequal representation, so not only is his narrative understanding poor, his statistical understanding is even worse.

And then at the end claims, "It’s hard to talk about these kinds of projects without mentioning the concept of the Network State" which - actually - it's not that hard! Nobody cares about the network state. It has the form of someone who tried to write a book report without doing the reading.

I was surprised that the article ended up being about race, but the actual image was about age ("Where are all the grandparents?"). I had thought they were going to make the point on more levels than they ended up doing.