On the same day as homemade bombs were detonated in New Jersey and Manhattan in September 2016, the New York Times ran an article in its Real Estate section about the shift toward verisimilitude in representations of New York City apartments. The author, Ronda Kaysen, argues that living quarters depicted in contemporary television shows set in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens reflect the reality of a generation who “earned about 20 percent less in real wages in 2014 than they would have earned in 2000.” These fictional apartments, Kaysen observes, contrast starkly to the plethora of fantastical urban dwellings on television screens in the 1990s, including character Carrie Bradshaw’s “Upper East Side brownstone” with its conspicuous “walk-in closet” in HBO’s Sex and the City. Despite Kaysen’s attention to important issues of sustainable development, including wage stagnation, rent control, and displacement by gentrification, her article took a backseat to news of terrorism. Urban residents’ real or perceived vulnerabilities to terrorist attacks overshadowed, at least temporarily, Kaysen’s discussion of long overdue popular cultural attention to a veritable housing crisis.