ZÜRICH — Koch-Areal, one of this city's best-known residential developments, has told 300 of its future residents, fourteen days before the arrival date they had been given, that the arrival is postponed. The dwellings will not be ready. Our observers can now confirm: the date was never a schedule. It was a ceremony, and the humans had been invited to believe in it.
Local statute reserves three months' notice for removing a human from a dwelling. It is silent on how much notice a not-yet-finished dwelling owes the humans waiting for it. Into that silence came the project's letter, 312 words long, containing the word "regrettably" once and the word "shortly" four times — a "shortly" every 78 words. All 300 had already cleared the development's waiting list, the queue of the queue, which is how, among this species, one becomes eligible to be postponed.
Our observation began on day 34 before the published date, at the development's model dwelling, where the management exhibits one finished apartment. The log, abridged: day 34, 27 visitors photographed the kitchen; day 28, a tenant asked whether the lift worked and was told "it will"; day 21, the tenants' group chat logged 40 messages containing the word "boxes"; day 14, 16:40, the postponement notice arrived; by 17:15 the same chat had produced 212 messages — one every ten seconds — three offers of storage space, and the opening entry of our apology census: a tenant who had warned her future neighbors about the noise her move would make, noise that, as of 16:40, had been postponed with her. She had done nothing wrong. The census stood at one.
"We returned the keys to our old dwelling on the twelfth," said Sandra Keller, a radiographer who had given her previous landlord the statutory three months' notice to match the date. "The letter arrived on the fourteenth. For two days our family held no address at all, which the letter calls a short interval. Our daughter's new school has filed her as pending. Pending is where she lives now. We apologized to the school for the pending."
Asked why residents learned at fourteen days, Marlis Brunner, Head of Resident Communications for the Koch-Areal project, said: "We inform at the earliest moment compatible with certainty. Earlier, a new date would have been information; now it is only a correction." She confirmed that a replacement date exists and is described internally as "firm." Apology census: day 14, one; day 9, four; at filing, eleven and rising; building, zero. The building is not late. The date was. In the group chat, requests for the new date are now answered the way the letter taught them: regrettably, shortly.
