Routine Dilapidation: How Homeownership Creates Environmental Injustice

Abstract

This article draws on interviews with homeowners who have applied for home repair programs in Chicago and New Orleans to investigate how home repairs, and the lack thereof, shape residential and financial stability. I illuminate the relationship between housing precarity and a mundane and pervasive environmental housing issue: routine dilapidation that occurs over the life of all physical structures. I argue that routine dilapidation makes otherwise affordable housing unaffordable and demonstrate three mechanisms by which routine dilapidation worsens housing precarity: as a path to displacement, by preventing safe aging in place, and by exacerbating debt. My findings, coupled with existing research, suggest that these mechanisms disproportionately impact low-income Black senior women because they are more likely to own homes in need of repairs and are less likely to have resources to pay for repairs. I also use the concept of routine dilapidation to illuminate that homeownership produces environmental injustice more broadly. Routine dilapidation is not only a form of environmental injustice that disproportionately impacts some populations; it is inherent to the organization of the contemporary U.S. housing market.