Abstract
In The Danger Zone Is Everywhere: How Housing Discrimination Harms Health and Steals Wealth, George Lipsitz offers a sweeping, forcefully argued overview of two tightly intertwined domains: housing and health. Although these two domains have more frequently been examined in tandem within sociological scholarship, Lipsitz argues that in the practice of fair housing law and medicine, these two domains have remained largely siloed. This siloing, he argues, limits public and professional imagination for more comprehensive and effective policies that could ameliorate housing and health inequities, and it has direct, negative consequences for people of color (whom Lipsitz calls members of “aggrieved racialized groups” [p. 22]). Lipsitz draws on an impressive array of social scientific sources to establish the causes and interrelated consequences of housing and health inequities. And he foregrounds the creative, on-the-ground ways that people and communities of color across the United States have resisted these inequities and forged new practices of conviviality that prioritize housing and access to health care as human rights. Building on insights from these communities and others, Lipsitz also recommends short-, medium-, and long-term policy interventions that, together, could generate sustained support for housing and health equity.
Before providing some thoughts on the book’s strengths and some lingering questions I have after reading it, I’ll begin with a brief summary of each of the book’s three parts. First, Part I, “Who Hurts?” examines the people who experience housing and health discrimination and their dire, interrelated consequences. Chapter One examines the effects of such discrimination on children, particularly children of color. In addition to vividly illuminating these effects through the cases of Detroit, Michigan and Earlimart, California, this chapter also helpfully foregrounds precautionary principles practiced in pediatric medicine and environmental justice initiatives. Precautionary principles, Lipsitz argues, could be usefully applied to fair housing law—which has long tended to adopt the tort model of injury.
Chapter Two turns to an overview of research establishing the causal effects of health discrimination on housing and vice versa. And Chapter Three explains orienting concepts and tools to help the reader better understand and put a stop to housing and health discrimination and their mutually reinforcing destruction of communities of color. In addition to his emphasis on race as a political rather than biological category, Lipsitz reminds us that race is systemic and demands that we grapple with Black feminist theory—especially intersectionality. This focus is because, Lipsitz aptly claims, “intersectional problems require intersectional solutions” (p. 80).
Part II, “What Hurts?” describes how three domains—housing valuations (market appraisals and tax assessment), mass incarceration, and insurance—perpetuate housing and health inequalities between White people and people of color. Each of these domains is organized around the logics and practices of the racial capitalist system. Chapter Four tackles the first of these domains, reviewing the emergent literature establishing covertly and overtly racist mechanisms of market appraisals that depress home values in neighborhoods of color and for homeowners of color while inflating Whites’ home values. Lipsitz also tends to the scholarship establishing the overwhelmingly disparate impact of regressive tax assessments on communities of color, where homeowners pay disproportionately high property taxes relative to White households. Combined, housing valuations deplete wealth in communities of color—and contribute to health inequities. Chapter Five powerfully shows how mass incarceration has become a public health and a housing crisis. Chapter Six concludes Part III by examining the domain of the insurance industry, which has long relied on racist notions of people of color as financial risks. As with the costs associated with housing valuation and incarceration, insurance has directly exacerbated both housing and health inequities.
Finally, Part III, “What Helps?” explores how policymakers, lawyers, doctors, community organizers and activists, scholar-activists, and others can help ameliorate these entrenched housing and health inequities. Chapter Seven focuses on local housing and health groups that are doing the work of housing and health justice by inviting communities into logics and practices that center collective well-being while rejecting the logic of profit as a moral imperative. One of these groups is the Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities, and Community Health (ENRICH) organization in Canada. ENRICH has brought together Indigenous and Black Canadians to forge mutual recognition of shared experiences of environmental contamination and collective resilience and action. Their work, among other groups featured in this chapter, underscores Lipsitz’s argument that “it is not enough to have things to think, to feel, or to know”; we must also “explore things to do” (p. 17). Chapter Eight provides a series of short-, middle-, and long-term policy recommendations that in part build on the work of the community groups featured in Chapter Seven. Finally, Chapter Nine concludes with an urgent call to pay attention to housing and health discrimination—especially by listening to those most deeply harmed by it, who are already creating transformative alternatives to commodified housing and inadequate, harmful health care.
The Danger Zone Is Everywhere has many strengths. I’ll highlight two here. First, in line with his prior corpus of work (I’m sure I don’t need to tell anyone reading this how voluminous it is), Lipsitz insists on prioritizing the concerns, thoughts, and actions of the people at the center of these intersecting inequities. In contrast to large swaths of sociological research, he does not pathologize them or cast them as problems to be solved. He repeatedly points to the origins of housing and health inequities (White supremacy and racial capitalism) without losing the humanity of the people being harmed by these systems. Indeed, communities of color and their quiet and loud, local and far-reaching actions, care, and activism are the inspiration for much of the work. Second, Lipsitz persuasively places fair housing law and medical practice in conversation. He pushes fair housing lawyers to move beyond the tort model of injury and incorporate lessons learned from precautionary principles in medicine. And he pushes doctors and other medical practitioners to learn from fair housing advocates and the scholarship on systemic racism so that the limitations and harms of the biomedical model of disease do not continue to perpetuate health and housing inequality. Situating this conversation within the landscape of the twenty-first-century United States—one in which financialization and corporatization dominate housing and health industries—Lipsitz demonstrates that the tools used to fight discrimination in the mid-twentieth century will no longer suffice.
Alongside these strengths, I am left with a few lingering questions. One is related to Lipsitz’s argument that housing and health discrimination are international concerns. Beyond the example of ENRICH (above), I wondered what other non-U.S.-based cases Lipsitz might have considered in more detail to center the global nature of these inequities and from which to draw inspiration for community conviviality and policy. Another question is related to the tension between, on the one hand, advocating for housing valuations done “properly” (p. 98) to aid the process of wealth-building for homeowners of color and, on the other hand, pushing the reader to conceptualize housing as a human right (see, e.g., Chapter 8). Is a system of commodified housing such as exists in the United States, which relies on housing valuations to determine exchange value (and, consequently, wealth accumulation), fundamentally at odds with the practice of housing as a human right? Put another way, perhaps even the “proper” valuation would help certain homeowners build relatively more wealth than they would have otherwise—and that valuation would also leave intact the market for homes that has increasingly taken advantage of those unable to buy?
These questions and the contributions of the book have remained with me for weeks, bringing home for me the vivid, creative, and persuasive ways that Lipsitz invites us to consider, enter, and fight against the danger zone—not only housing and health as death-dealing domains, but as spaces of possibility, where our efforts to “participate meaningfully in a struggle that is certain to be brutal and bitter . . . perhaps might also be made beautiful” (p. 228).