One happy side effect of elite decline is that clever centrist apparatchiks occasionally sneak competent class criticisms past their editors. Annie Lowrey’s latest New York Times piece has more than a few. If you haven’t read the thing, do so before it gets thrown behind a paywall.

As an example of the intimately hostile creative class shade that Times writers bring to most of its DC reporting, it’s sterling. As an exercise in popular political economy, it leaves something to be desired.

The article does have a lot going for it. Lowrey’s storytelling is a model of lucidity for anyone interested in weaving together macroeconomic exposition and everyday lived experience. Hardly content with standard anti-gentrification pieties, she documents the networks of policy and patronage that have made the District’s recent condo metastasis possible. From Capitol Hill cocktail parties to twentysomething lease signings, the piece brims with the sort of vivid ethnographic detail those who admire Capital can appreciate.