On the dichotomy between housing justice and environmental justice

Introduction

A politically powerful dichotomy increasingly structures urban policy debates across the United States: the notion that we must choose between expedient housing production and rigorous environmental review and protection. This framing appears across institutional contexts—from mayoral directives expediting environmental review to clear housing bottlenecks (Wagner, 2024), to state-led efforts to streamline or bound local environmental review in the name of housing affordability (Biber et al., 2024), and to developer and policymaker discourse that positions environmental review as a primary obstacle to solving the housing crisis, often characterized as “environmental NIMBYism” (Housing Affordability Institute, 2023). This debate presents itself as pragmatism, but I posit that it instead rests on an impoverished imagination. It assumes that speed and safety are mutually exclusive and that marginalized populations must be the ones to absorb the costs of expediency. This trade-off is symptomatic of a broader systemic affliction which incessantly produces politically designated spaces wherein elevated risk and incomplete knowledge are administratively tolerated for some populations but not others (Lerner, 2012; De Souza, 2021; Brock et al., 2021). Rather than treating such spaces as ontological categories, I use this language to describe a governance outcome—that is, a set of decisions about where uncertainty, exposure, and regulatory leniency are considered acceptable under specific political–economic arrangements.

In this context, housing is one site among many in which the logic of disposability is reproduced. Thus, I claim that the debate at hand between rapid housing construction and environmental safety is made possible only by an historically produced common sense, born from racial capitalism and accelerated by the financialization of housing, which naturalizes the trade-off between shelter and safety. This understanding of racial capitalism builds on work that situates environmental inequality not simply in uneven exposure, but in the racialized structuring of political and economic processes that determine whose health, environments, and lives are systematically devalued (Pulido, 2016; Pulido, 2017). The dichotomy is not a natural law of urban governance but the product of political and institutional arrangements that make the trade-off between housing and environmental safety appear unavoidable while protecting the interests of capital and the state. By pitting the urgency of the housing crisis against the institutionalized management of chronic environmental risk (Nixon, 2011; Davies, 2018), it ensures that both crises remain unresolved.

In this sense, the central problem is not simply the presence of environmental contaminants, but the political organization of knowledge about them. Contemporary housing governance routinely relies on truncated forms of assessment that generate just enough information to permit redevelopment while foreclosing more expansive inquiry into exposure pathways, bioavailability, and cumulative risk. These epistemic limits are not accidental. They are produced via regulatory thresholds, studies driven by consultants, and financing timelines which treat comprehensive investigation as an impediment rather than a public obligation. Thus, the dichotomy between housing justice and environmental justice operates as an epistemic technology of governance which converts uncertainty into a resource for capital all the while rendering residents’ claims to full environmental knowledge politically unreasonable.

The language of “urgency” is central, but its source is often misidentified. This urgency is not merely bureaucratic; it is fundamentally financial. As the old model of direct public financing and long-term stewardship has been dismantled, PPPs have become the dominant delivery system, reorganizing housing around the logic of private investment (Kirk, 2025a). Importantly, a PPP is typically defined as a contractual arrangement between a public agency and a private firm in which resources and risks are shared for the delivery of public services or infrastructure (Li and Akintoye, 2003: 4). In U.S. public housing redevelopment, PPPs typically combine public land ownership with private development and financing structures—most commonly through Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, layered public subsidies, and long-term private management contracts—embedding redevelopment within the timelines and return expectations of private capital (Kirk, 2025a). Consequently, the pressure for speed is the urgency of capital seeking a return. Environmental review is cast as delay, a threat to deal closure, and remediation is reframed as a cost variable to be minimized. This financial logic ensures that speed is politically mobilized on behalf of developers, while slowness—that is, the incremental poisoning of residents—is imposed upon those who must endure it.

The crisis of homelessness and the dearth of affordable housing are rightly described as emergencies requiring immediate intervention. Yet, the potentially correlated afflictions of asthma, cancer, and lead poisoning are redefined as a tolerable background risk. What appears as a technical trade-off is, in fact, an ideological project which accomplished two things simultaneously: first, it legitimizes state retreat from the responsibility to provide safe housing as a public good. By outsourcing development to private developers, the state reframes its role as a facilitator of private capital rather than a guarantor of public welfare. Second, it masks that the same communities targeted by mid-twentieth-century slum clearance, redlining, and toxic siting are now told that financial feasibility requires them to accept further exposure.

This article argues that the housing—environment dichotomy is a powerful ideological weapon of contemporary urban policy, an ideological weapon which teaches us that safety and shelter cannot coexist in marginalized territories, that poor communities must learn to expect less, and that market feasibility is the ultimate arbiter of human need. Against this fatalism, I insist that housing justice and environmental justice are inseparable. The real question is not whether we build quickly or carefully, but whether we are willing to reframe deeply affordable housing as a proper public good, provisioned outside the capitalist imperative to generate profit.

To make this argument, I first briefly trace the historical roots of administratively acceptable harm in U.S. housing governance, from New Deal-era siting practices to the neoliberal financialization of public housing. I then examine the case of the Jordan Downs public housing development as a paradigmatic example of how the PPP model bureaucratizes exposure, transforming stigma into a financially sanctioned risk. I then offer comparative vignettes from San Francisco, East Chicago, and Flint to show that this is a national pattern. Finally, I turn to alternatives—both historical and emergent—demonstrating the possibility of safe, dignified, and environmentally just housing.

Data at Jordan Downs was collected between October 2024 and November 2025 through 26 semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis. Interviewees included public housing residents (n = 10), housing authority staff, environmental regulators, private developers, environmental consultants, public health researchers, and environmental justice advocates (n = 16). Resident participants varied in length of residence from 5 to over 40 years, enabling attention to cumulative exposure and temporal dimensions of environmental risk. The analysis does not seek to establish toxicological causality, but to examine how regulatory thresholds, consultant practices, and financing timelines shape what counts as assessable harm and when further investigation is foreclosed. At the time of the interviews, most resident participants were living in the original Jordan Downs housing complex awaiting relocation or redevelopment phases, while a smaller number had already moved into newly constructed units within the redevelopment area. This variation allowed the study to capture residents’ perceptions across both pre-redevelopment and early redevelopment conditions.

The historical roots of acceptable harm

To understand how this dichotomy came to dominate U.S. urban politics, we must situate it within the long arc of racialized housing governance. The production of administratively acceptable harm in public housing redevelopment is the logical endpoint of an historical trajectory stretching from the New Deal to the present.

Though the early public housing programs of the 1930’s and 1940’s had notable successes (Kirk, 2025b), they were themselves compromised projects built under Jim Crow conditions, segregated by race, and strategically sited in already marginalized districts. These patterns unfolded alongside the federal government's redlining practices, in which Home Owners’ Loan Corporation maps designated Black and immigrant neighborhoods as hazardous for investment, systematically restricting mortgage credit and reinforcing racialized patterns of disinvestment (Rothstein, 2017). Scholars have shown how the Housing Acts of 1937 and 1949 were not simply welfare-state triumphs but also instruments of racial ordering (Hirsch, 1983; Rothstein, 2017). Urban renewal—the so-called “Negro removal” of the mid-twentieth century—extended this logic, clearing Black neighborhoods under the guise of slum clearance and displacing residents into public housing developments located in environmentally hazardous industrial zones.

What Gilmore (2007) terms “organized abandonment” intensified in the decades that followed. As federal funding for public housing declined in the 1970’s and 1980’s, projects across the country fell into disrepair. This disinvestment was part of a larger restructuring: a deliberate offloading of responsibility onto local authorities and, increasingly, private partners. By the 1990’s, HOPE VI and later the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative reframed the very meaning of public housing. Instead of a collective responsibility, housing became a platform for “revitalization” through PPPs.

At the same time, environmental justice movements were exposing how toxic siting decisions had disproportionately targeted Black, Indigenous, and working-class communities. The fight against landfills, petrochemical corridors, and hazardous waste facilities made clear that environmental harm was not randomly distributed but deeply structured by race and class. Yet, instead of linking housing justice to environmental justice, state policy doubled down on treating them as separate—and often conflicting—spheres. Housing was governed through urgency, and the environment through regulation. The result was a politics in which regulation was framed as the enemy of shelter, even when it was the only tool residents had to demand safe conditions.

The dichotomy, then, is a synthesis of two trajectories: the neoliberalization of housing and the racialized fragmentation of environmental governance. It draws on a much longer tradition of what Wacquant (2008) calls “territorial stigmatization,” where socially discredited urban districts are treated as suitable dumping grounds for both social problems and environmental hazards. Perhaps nowhere is this synthesis more starkly illustrated than in the redevelopment of Jordan Downs in Los Angeles, a case that embodies how historical, racialized environmental injustices are reproduced under the modern logic of PPPs.

The case of the Jordan downs public housing redevelopment

Originally constructed for white war workers, the complex became home to Black families after World War II, a population confined to South Los Angeles by racially restrictive covenants and federal redlining that deemed their neighborhoods hazardous for investment. This was not a neutral location; the city had already zoned Watts for industry and disposal. Indeed, Jordan Downs was strategically situated in a landscape of oil pipelines, scrap metal facilities, and bus depots that leaked fuel into the soil for decades (Andersen Environmental, 2014: 19–20). This history of racial containment and industrial siting bred a territorial stigma that continues to shape policy. In the 1980’s and ‘90 s, media and police narratives had branded the area as “gang-infested” (Woocher, 2023; Ramos, 1999), a label which dehumanized residents and justified decades of state abandonment and over-policing. This stigma is the precondition for the current redevelopment, creating a political environment where the community is seen as both deserving of investment yet also expected to accept less than what is humanely deserved.

It is upon this landscape that the PPP arrived in the early 2010’s, bringing with it a relentless culture of urgency. At Jordan Downs, redevelopment has proceeded through a PPP led by the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA), which retains ownership of the land while development responsibilities are undertaken by private and non-profit partners including The Michaels Organization and BRIDGE Housing. These entities assemble layered financing packages—typically combining Low-Income Housing Tax Credits allocated by the California Tax Credit Allocation Committee, public subsidies from local and federal agencies, and conventional construction debt—to construct and manage new housing (City of Los Angeles, 2016). Within this arrangement, the public sector provides land, regulatory authority, and subsidy streams, while private developers coordinate financing, construction, and property management.

The urgency brought about by the PPP is financial and political. A California Department of Toxic Substances Control supervisor revealed the pressure: “These developers get these grants . . . You got to spend it, you got two, three years to spend it. So, a lot of pressure to break ground” (Interview, 21 August 2025). Certainly, for a community shaped by decades of infrastructural neglect and policy abandonment, the sudden imperative to accelerate redevelopment produced a profound temporal contradiction. Where state action had long been characterized by delay and deferral—deferred maintenance, postponed investments, protracted planning processes—redevelopment now mobilized urgency as its organizing logic. Yet, this acceleration was not simply imposed upon residents from above. The phased, parcel-by-parcel approach that would generate such concern emerged directly from residents’ own political demands, forged through generations of struggle against displacement.

In 1988, more than 150 public housing residents and supporters staged the first-ever protest by public housing tenants in Los Angeles history, confronting city hall over slum conditions and the lack of police protection (Brooks, 1993: 217). The following year, when the HACLA attempted to sell Jordan Downs to a private developer, over 600 residents packed the development's gymnasium, heckling housing authority officials into silence and forcing them to abandon their presentation (Brooks, 1993: 190). As one tenant leader declared at the time: “For 18 months we have been struggling to get the Housing Authority to understand the needs of residents. Residents will no longer be complacent . . . The time for studies should stop. The time to work with residents should start” (Nadine Janisse, qtd. in Brooks, 1993: 200).

This political inheritance carried forward. In the decades that followed, tenant organizations—including the LA Human Right to Housing Collective, LA Community Action Network, and Union de Vecinos—continued to challenge HACLA's privatization strategies, block proposed eviction policy changes through Agency Plan hearings, and mobilize residents against displacement (Brooks, 1993; LA Community Action Network, 2013). When Jordan Downs tenants later confronted the prospect of redevelopment, they brought with them what earlier struggles had taught: that privatization reliably produced displacement; that “good standing” return requirements could function as exclusion mechanisms; and that enforceable rights, not mere promises, were required. By 2014–2016, tenants had secured core guarantees from HACLA—one-for-one replacement, right-to-return protections, and structured consultation commitments. These were not gifts of partnership; they were outcomes of struggle. The resulting “build-first” model—constructing new units on vacant parcels before demolishing existing housing—represented a significant concession to this organized pressure. Following decades of displacement wrought by urban renewal and subsequent redevelopment initiatives across Los Angeles, tenant organizers made anti-displacement a non-negotiable condition of revitalization. This demand was institutionalized in HACLA's commitment to phasing, formally approved by the Los Angeles City Planning Commission in its 2016 Jordan Downs Urban Village Specific Plan (City of Los Angeles, 2016: 10).

Yet, this hard-won provision generated its own contradictions under the institutional conditions of public–private governance. The same phasing designed to prevent social dislocation simultaneously enabled environmental remediation to be subordinated to construction timelines. As a HACLA staff member explained, operational logic dictated that contamination be addressed incrementally: “We clean as we go. If something shows up, we address it for that parcel. We don't stop the entire project. That wouldn't make sense” (Interview, 2 June 2025). What residents had secured as protection against displacement became, within the institutional apparatus of the PPP, a mechanism for containing environmental response to the scale of the parcel, thereby foreclosing the possibility of site-wide remediation which might interrupt financing schedules or delay construction.

For residents, this produced not only distrust but a more fundamental epistemological crisis. They had won the right to remain, but could not access authoritative knowledge about the safety of the place they were remaining in. A 19-year resident, a Black woman, articulated a concern that emerged across five of ten resident interviews: “I don't know if that dirt outside was tested or not. I hope it was” (Interview, 28 August 2025). Her uncertainty was a structural condition produced by the fragmentation of environmental responsibility across consultants, regulators, and developers, none of whom were positioned to offer residents definitive assurance. The temporal paradox was thus deepened, as the very governance structure designed to keep residents in place systematically deprived them of the knowledge required to assess whether staying was safe.

A senior housing official articulated the stark trade-off: “If we had to fully clean every parcel, it would cost hundreds of millions. We’d never house anyone . . . Do you want a clean site or a place for families to sleep tonight?” (Interview, 10 July 2025). This framing forced residents into an impossible choice. They could continue waiting in dilapidated housing or accept potential poison in new homes. When soil tests found lead concentrations exceeding screening thresholds at Jordan Downs, the Department of Toxic Substances Control did not require comprehensive site-wide remediation. Instead, it deemed the contamination consistent with “urban background” levels for Los Angeles—an administrative designation that limited remediation obligations rather than establishing health-relevant exposure or risk. Exceedance of screening levels does not itself demonstrate poisoning or elevated blood lead levels, which depend on bioavailability, exposure pathways, and age-specific vulnerability. Yet, no such assessment was undertaken. ¹

What is at stake, then, is not a proven toxicological outcome but what I shall call a systematic foreclosure of inquiry. By treating maximum concentration values as sufficient grounds for closure, regulators converted uncertainty into a governance resource: enough information to permit redevelopment, but not enough to trigger obligations that might threaten project timelines or financing. An environmental consultant admitted: “If every site in LA had to remediate fully, no housing would ever get built . . . The goal isn’t perfection” (Interview, 21 August 2025). For residents, this was not a surprise but a continuation of an historical pattern in which the scope of what counts as assessable, actionable, and remediable is calibrated to capital feasibility rather than to health.

The human cost of this calculation is lived daily. Residents report asthma, migraines, and rashes they link to their environment. A 70-year-old Black man, a lifelong resident, described his unexplained migraines: “But when you see so many people around you sick, man, you stop believing it's just bad luck” (Interview A, 30 March 2025). One resident described the exhausting vigilance: “You start to second-guess everything . . . Is the water safe? Is the air? You can't live like that forever . . . but there's nowhere else for us to go” (Interview B, 30 March 2025). Fearing retaliation, many feel silenced. “You complain too much, maybe suddenly your renewal paperwork gets ‘lost,’” one resident noted (Interview, 28 February 2025). A retired janitor who lived at Jordan Downs for 40 years observed, “I don't think they expect us to live real long anyway, and that's probably good for the bottom line” (Interview, 26 June 2025). A local activist named perhaps the core injustice: “We’re not anti-housing. We want the housing . . . But we shouldn't have to breathe in toxins to get it. Why is that the price? If this was happening in Westwood or Pasadena, there would be outrage. No way. But because it's Watts, it's like no one gives a shit” (Interview, 11 April 2025). These accounts do not necessarily establish causal links between redevelopment conditions and specific health outcomes, but rather reflect residents’ perceptions of environmental risk shaped by long histories of industrial exposure, uncertainty about remediation, and the absence of authoritative health assessments in place.

The redevelopment of Jordan Downs is not a break from its past, but a continuation of it. The urgency to finally provide justice has been weaponized to ensure that the historical terms of what has been called a “sacrifice zone,” a spatial designation rooted in race and class wherein certain communities are rendered disposable (Lerner, 2012; De Souza, 2021; Brock et al., 2021), remain foundationally unchallenged. Jordan Downs demonstrates that the housing versus environmental review debate is a framework which only gains traction in contexts pre-ruined by racial capitalism: the “environment” in question is already poisoned, and the “housing” being produced is for populations deemed expendable. The dichotomy accepts the terms of this racial-spatial order as a given rather than challenging its very existence. It asks, “How much harm is acceptable here?” instead of “Why is this the only option?” This reveals the core ideological function of the dichotomy: to constrain the horizon of political possibility. By framing the choice as one between speed and safety, it naturalizes the notion that safe, healthy, dignified housing for the poor is inherently unfeasible. It resigns us to a politics of triage and compromise, ensuring that racial and class inequalities are not solved but merely managed. In this sense, the dichotomy is a technology of governance which programs us to accept the inevitability of harm and to mistrust the possibility of public goods delivered without private sacrifice.

A national pattern: flint, hunters point, and East Chicago

The general logic that pits housing against environmental safety is a national strategy of governance not unique to Jordan Downs. From the Rust Belt to the California coast, the same dichotomy is deployed, forcing marginalized communities to choose between the basic right to shelter and the basic right to health. While these cases involve distinct institutional settings—e.g. municipal austerity governance in Flint, contaminated brownfield redevelopment in San Francisco, federal housing displacement in East Chicago—they nevertheless reveal a shared governing logic. In each instance, environmental risk is not eliminated but administratively managed in ways that protect fiscal or development imperatives. The specific mechanisms vary, but the underlying pattern is consistent: institutional actors define thresholds of acceptable harm which allow housing systems to continue functioning without confronting the full environmental costs imposed on marginalized communities.

Enacting an inseparable justice

The dichotomy between housing and environmental justice is not a natural law but a political artifact of contemporary neoliberal racial capitalist housing governance. Its power lies not only in material arrangements, but in how regulatory and development institutions organize what can be known, measured, and acted upon. By defining the scope of assessment narrowly and calibrating remediation obligations to financial feasibility, these institutions convert uncertainty into a governing instrument. The result is a system which actively produces harm, structures when harm must be proven, when it can be ignored, and when it may become politically actionable.

The most powerful rebuttal to the dichotomy emerges from communities themselves, where organizing efforts explicitly fuse housing and environmental justice. Groups like the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston and the Cooper Square Community Land Trust in New York City have long demonstrated that decommodified land ownership is a foundational step toward just development. The next generation of such trusts is building green mandates directly into their bylaws, constructing ultra-efficient affordable units, installing community solar microgrids, and undertaking phased soil remediation on their permanently held land. Because they are free from the pressure to maximize returns for distant investors, they can prioritize long-term resident health and sustainability over short-term financial feasibility. Meanwhile, in cities from Los Angeles to Baltimore, tenant unions are expanding their demands beyond rent control to include what they term “green repairs.” They are organizing to force landlords to remediate lead paint, replace mold-infested walls, and install proper ventilation systems. Their activism reframes substandard conditions not as mere maintenance issues but as environmental racism within the home, legally contesting them under warranty of habitability laws. This movement powerfully asserts that housing justice is meaningless if the housing itself is making people sick. On a national policy level, the vision of a Green New Deal for Public Housing (U.S. Congress, 2021) offers the most comprehensive blueprint for transcending the dichotomy. It doesn't ask how to balance speed and safety; it mandates both by calling for the full-scale decarbonization and remediation of the entire public housing stock through direct federal investment, and by producing new and better public housing elsewhere. It is a direct rejection of the public–private partnership model, recentering the state's role as a direct provider of a public good.

Moving beyond critique requires concrete policy mechanisms that begin to dismantle the institutional arrangements through which housing has been subordinated to capital accumulation. A truly reparative environmental review process would fundamentally alter its purpose from a hurdle to be cleared to a public instrument for producing comprehensive, health-relevant knowledge about exposure, cumulative risk, and historical legacies of racialized disinvestment. At present, however, Environmental Impact Reports have frequently functioned not as neutral safeguards but as mechanisms through which racialized working-class communities are displaced in the name of remediation and redevelopment, even where risks could be technically managed in place (Cutts et al., 2017). Rather than eliminating injustice, environmental review is often mobilized to render land “clean enough” for capital while making existing residents the primary obstacles to be removed. In this sense, regulatory practice does not eliminate environmental risk so much as institutionalize thresholds of acceptable harm compatible with (re)development. A reparative model would therefore prohibit the use of administratively convenient benchmarks as substitutes for health-based assessment, require evaluation of exposure pathways and bioavailability where relevant, and provide residents with independent technical capacity to conduct parallel testing and hire their own experts.

Decoupling housing production from market feasibility requires leveraging existing tools in new ways. Municipalities can use eminent domain and transfer taxes to acquire and bank land, taking it off the speculative market. This land can then be leased for a nominal fee to non-profit developers or a re-empowered public housing authority, effectively removing land cost—the largest driver of unfeasibility—from the development equation. Replacing the complex, private-investor-driven Low-Income Housing Tax Credit system with direct federal capital grants for social housing construction would eliminate the need to negotiate profit margins for private equity and allow all resources to flow into construction and remediation quality. Finally, legally requiring that redevelopment governance boards have a resident majority with real decision-making power ensures that “health” and “safety” are defined by those who will live with the consequences.

The point, then, is not to adjudicate whether speed or safety should take precedence. It is to challenge the political and epistemic conditions that make such a choice seem unavoidable in the first place. A housing system organized around democratic control and public obligation would treat comprehensive environmental knowledge as a prerequisite of development, not an obstacle to it. Housing justice and environmental justice are inseparable because both are struggles over whether the conditions of social reproduction—and the knowledge required to secure them—will be governed as public obligations or as costs to be minimized under capitalist accumulation.