The Hot New Luxury Good for the Rich: Air

February 23, 2024 1:54 PM

The wealthy have different houses, different cars, different lifestyles from the rest of us. These days, they also want to breathe different air.

Once enclosed inside, the air we breathe is not the same. The notion that smoke could be a democratizing force, afflicting everyone equally and perhaps motivating them to take action to mitigate worsening climate conditions, is already colliding with the reality of an emerging luxury air market, yet another example of how, as the environment becomes less habitable, the wealthy will continue to insulate themselves from its worst aspects—even as their lifestyles disproportionately fuel emissions. As the fervor for ventilation that began during the pandemic meets the need to blockade against smoke, some wealthy people will do anything, and pay any amount, to guarantee they will always have a breath of fresh air.

posted by MrVisible (37 comments total)

The very freshest air, of course, is composed largely of one's own farts.
posted by biogeo at 1:58 PM on February 23 [12 favorites]

Perri-air is finally real!
posted by robotmachine at 2:03 PM on February 23 [33 favorites]

spaceballs was not an instruction manual!
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 2:03 PM on February 23 [50 favorites]

some wealthy people will do anything, and pay any amount, to guarantee they will always have a breath of fresh air.

Taxes?
posted by amanda at 2:05 PM on February 23 [59 favorites]

some wealthy people will do anything, and pay any amount, to guarantee they will always have a breath of fresh air.

Taxes?

I would do anything for air, but I won't do that.
posted by robotmachine at 2:06 PM on February 23 [62 favorites]

well, no, not taxes
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:06 PM on February 23 [9 favorites]

Anything but taxes, obviously
posted by The River Ivel at 2:06 PM on February 23 [5 favorites]

Expecting people to pay for breathable air, how absurd!

What's next, charging for potable water?
posted by snuffleupagus at 2:14 PM on February 23 [4 favorites]

I think wealthier people have usually had better air but it wasn't because of things like hospital grade HEPA filters, triple pane glass, or isolated ventilation systems in their homes but because they live on streets with less traffic, more trees, and away from industrial properties. Less car exhaust, noise, and particulate matter in the air plus more trees and vegetation to help absorb what pollutants there are gives you cleaner air.

I guess if you're talking about people in condos Manhattan and the like where busy streets and not enough trees are a given you need to resort to building solutions instead.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 2:16 PM on February 23 [11 favorites]

The very freshest air, of course, is composed largely of one's own farts.

That always seemed like an engineering flaw for those rubber water-recirculation suits people in Dune wear.

The article is worth reading. While I agree with the point made by the author and many of the experts who are quoted, that much more needs to be done to improve indoor air quality for the 99% of us, I also can completely understand a person choosing to spend more for better indoor air. We installed AC a couple of years ago, specifically because of summer wildfire events. Previously we had to choose between stifling in the heat with closed windows, or opening the windows to get cool but dangerously polluted air. If I could afford the kind of system the article describes, I'd probably get it.
posted by Dip Flash at 2:36 PM on February 23 [3 favorites]

I can see this going over big with all those EU thingies where how a pasty be a cornish pasty only within the confines of certain geospatial vortexual timelines so now the air has to be bottled in the place on the label but only before 2023 because that country doesn't exist anymore.

And one step closer to smell on the internet.
posted by MonsieurPEB at 2:58 PM on February 23 [2 favorites]

You know the air is good, he told me, because the hydrangeas last. Typically, when cut at the stem and arranged in a vase, the delicate flowers wither and droop in a few days. In his apartment, the blooms will stay perky for nearly two weeks.

What? No. Filtered air is not particularly beneficial for cut flowers. This is a matter of humidity, temperature, hygiene, and preservatives in the water and/or sprayed on the flowers.
posted by oneirodynia at 3:01 PM on February 23 [17 favorites]

To be fair, in the past, there have been times that air was in very short supply for the very rich.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:05 PM on February 23 [9 favorites]

arnoldtotalrecall.gif
posted by gottabefunky at 3:18 PM on February 23 [2 favorites]

"I can feel it coming in the air tonight,
oh lord"
posted by clavdivs at 3:27 PM on February 23 [7 favorites]

Lucky enough to live somewhere in the mountains where (checks PurpleAir current values - currently 0-14 for nearest sensors) my air quality is generally always "green" with some rare forest fire exceptions here and there. Doesn't stop me getting pamphlets in the mail regularly for full home air purifying installation - often trying to guilt me that my kids deserve perfectly clean air all the time.

I worry more about my kids *not* getting exposed to air with at least some pollen etc. I mean I'm not going to make them breathe from the tail pipe of my car or anything but still...
posted by inflatablekiwi at 3:31 PM on February 23 [1 favorite]

Zardoz…





…Anyway, off to read the article now!
posted by ashbury at 3:40 PM on February 23 [1 favorite]

Suck it down like a millionaire.
posted by pompomtom at 3:41 PM on February 23 [3 favorites]

Could we also add "different planet" to the list?
posted by WatTylerJr at 4:01 PM on February 23

I'm not a zillionaire, but...I have a basic air cleaner in my home (a Coway). There are thousands of these types of devices on Amazon. I live in Southern California, where there is much more than just "smoke", and since buying the purifier, my issues with basic "allergies" has been lowered substantially.
I have a humidifier for the really really dry days we have here. I have a portable "dehumidifier" that works pretty well, too.
During the pandemic, cleaner air inside buildings was touted as a basic health issue. Air filtering meant less Covid. The "Hepa Filter in a Box Fan" device is simple to make, and I hope people still push these sorts of things for classrooms, stuffy offices, etc.
Behold: the Corsi-Rosenthal Box

So: I don't understand the point of this article, making it seem "only the rich" can have access to "better air".
It isn't hard to improve your indoor environment.

And, the thread in Metafilter just last year on how to make a Box Fan Hepa Filter.

posted by pthomas745 at 5:08 PM on February 23 [10 favorites]

If you live on or near a main road and don't take steps to filter your air then you WILL be breathing in sooty, oily vehicle tyre dust.
posted by neonamber at 5:59 PM on February 23 [4 favorites]

The entire layout of the little factory town I grew up in is a great illustration of any portmanteau in a storm’s point above. The factory closed before my time, but its decaying hulk loomed over the train tracks down at the bottom of the big hill much of the town leaned up against. Just across from the factory are several blocks of rowhouses for workers. As you go up the hill there are duplexes, then single-family houses for middle-management types, eventually Victorian mansions with carriage houses in back for the big shots, and finally an actual castle where the owner of the factory lived. Set way back from the road - but still visible of course - this place was around a mile-ish from the factory and atop the hill, presumably well away from the smoke and noise.
And there must be hundreds or thousands of towns like this in the US alone.
(What did my little town’s factory make? Asbestos products, actually. But that’s another story or is it.)
posted by zoinks at 6:27 PM on February 23 [3 favorites]

Prophecy come true: factory air conditioned air from our fully factory-equipped air conditioned factory
posted by JoeXIII007 at 6:28 PM on February 23 [8 favorites]

Kurosawa’s “High and Low” was partly about this.
posted by toodleydoodley at 6:58 PM on February 23 [1 favorite]

Behold: the Corsi-Rosenthal Box

No shit I live next to an oil refinery and a recurring peat fire. Love this thing.

A+ public health departments should distribute these things, and wifi them to a local PM station, and have them switch on in 'real time' if a 100um or 35 um threshold is exceeded (10 minutes).
posted by eustatic at 7:13 PM on February 23 [3 favorites]

I'm not a zillionaire, but...I have a basic air cleaner in my home (a Coway).

Yeah air purifiers have become an extremely common sight in my life since COVID, since West Coast wildfires got awful, since everybody started reading articles about how bad particulate pollution is for you.

This article seems like it’s describing a classic example of rich people taking a trendy preoccupation to the next level because they can.
posted by atoxyl at 10:18 PM on February 23 [3 favorites]

the reality of an emerging luxury air market, yet another example of how, as the environment becomes less habitable, the wealthy will continue to insulate themselves from its worst aspects—even as their lifestyles disproportionately fuel emissions

Sure, billionaires as a phenomenon are bad and stupid, that's a given. But the building this article is about has

a Passive House Institute certification, which recognizes when buildings minimize the energy used for heating and cooling with airtight seals and insulation. (Such measures can decrease energy consumption by up to 90 percent.)

Buildings consume more energy than any other human-made thing, transport included, so energy-efficient construction is to be applauded in my view. If this building is as well designed as the article suggests, the energy budget for all of its air handling machinery would be well below that devoted to heating and cooling a less well designed home and the running costs correspondingly lower.

And for a new apartment building in the age of overpopulation-driven respiratory pandemics, separate air handling per living space is simply sanity.

So I have no beef with the building as described. Such design features should be standard for all new apartment construction, especially given that the running cost savings over the HVAC equipment's service life should easily cover the increased capital cost of components like superwindows, heat exchangers, UV sanitizers and HEPA filters. What we do need to address, as a matter of urgency, is the perverse incentives created by the fact that capital costs are typically incurred by landlords and running costs by tenants.
posted by flabdablet at 10:37 PM on February 23 [10 favorites]

In the kitchen when I visited, I stood underneath a vent as Roe turned on the hood over the gas stove. Charlotte’s system detects how much air is being taken up through exhaust vents and immediately begins to replace it with clean outdoor air.

Fuck that guy for designing a gas stove into a new build instead of an induction cooktop.
posted by flabdablet at 10:44 PM on February 23 [13 favorites]

Another thing worth bearing in mind about buildings like this is that because they're constantly doing air exchange and filtering it on the way in, their exhaust air is cleaner than the outside air it's exhausting into (unless gas stoves! Fuck that guy). If standard building codes specified that every building must be well sealed except for forced ventilation through a heat exchanger and HEPA filter, city air quality would improve for everybody. Not as much as if cities had enough trees, but better than what exists today.
posted by flabdablet at 2:07 AM on February 24 [4 favorites]

Specifying a decent minimum standard for indoor air exchange rates, along with the standard use of heat exchangers to maintain high thermal efficiencies, would also go a long way toward addressing MrVisible's longstanding and oft-expressed concern about the ongoing viability of humanity in the face of rising CO₂ levels.

Even the worst-case climate-wrecking CO₂ concentration ever likely to be found in outdoors air pales into insignificance next to the everyday levels encountered inside commercial and residential buildings whose HVAC systems rely principally on recirculating indoors air.
posted by flabdablet at 2:22 AM on February 24 [5 favorites]

Some folks will never experience the heady aroma of napalm in the morning.
posted by nofundy at 4:20 AM on February 24

When I was a kid there was a PSA on the french CBC TV channel which depicted a poor person stumbling around in a futuristic society where all the rich people were walking around wearing portable breathing apparatus because of all the pollution. He begs passerby for some change, and when someone finally gives him some he puts it into a sort of vending machine with an enclosed dome full of plants and and an oxygen mask hanging off the side, but it doesn't work so he ends up walking away in frustration and despair.

Anyway.

(all of this IIRC, this was a long time ago and it doesn't seem to be on YouTube, but other people have recalled it when I brought it up)
posted by The Card Cheat at 4:48 AM on February 24 [2 favorites]

Fuck that guy for designing a gas stove into a new build instead of an induction cooktop.

That seemed odd to me, especially if they are marketing the units via their clean air. We replaced an old, malfunctioning gas stove with an induction stove. Partly it was because I'd been reading about how great induction stoves are, and also with an idea to slowly switching gas appliances to electric ahead of eventually adding solar panels. But mostly it was because of the repeated articles warning about indoor air pollution risks from gas stoves. Now that we have the induction stove, I actually like it better than the gas, which I hadn't expected -- I had thought it would be "good enough" but not actually better.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:30 AM on February 24 [3 favorites]

Last Thanksgiving, Roe had friends and family over to Charlotte for all the usual fixings—turkey, stuffing, potatoes, cranberry sauce. The people sitting at the table were perhaps a dozen or so feet from the stove and oven. “They could barely smell the food,” Roe said. “It’s very, very effective.”

Hmm, yes, who doesn't want to eat Thanksgiving dinner without all those pesky ... checks notes... Thanksgiving dinner smells?
posted by Is It Over Yet? at 7:56 AM on February 24 [7 favorites]

That would be the same insane rich people who made their whole interior entirely white. It takes a special brand of weirdness to prefer living in some weird-ass sci-fi operating theatre film set.
posted by flabdablet at 8:47 AM on February 24 [2 favorites]

Better than among us, the filthy poors!!!
posted by tiny frying pan at 10:18 AM on February 24

That always seemed like an engineering flaw for those rubber water-recirculation suits people in Dune wear

Not that Herbert and son ever discussed the elephant in the skin suit poop chute. Also known as the Arrakeen Butt Lift.
posted by y2karl at 7:14 PM on February 24