Oosterlynck and Beeckmans expose the distributive blind spot within the apparently universal promise of the 15-minute city. Proximity, walkability, local services and reduced car dependence may be desirable, but the model tacitly assumes the housing security, employment flexibility and consumer autonomy of the Western urban middle class. The authors’ decisive operation is to shift analysis from the quality of the residential environment to the political economy of inhabitation: who can afford to live in well-served neighbourhoods, who performs the non-telework labour that sustains proximity, and who lacks the “exit” option of moving elsewhere. The result is a critique of spatial optimisation detached from housing and income policy. Urban justice cannot be inferred from geometric accessibility alone because identical distances are lived through unequal resources, labour conditions and housing positions. The essay therefore connects proximity planning to broader debates on gentrification, class and distributive justice, insisting that a socially just neighbourhood model must organise access to housing and livelihoods as seriously as access to amenities.