Roughly four in five Americans live in cities. On most days, few of us probably notice the buildings around us are crumbling. However, sometimes things fall apart and demand our attention, and we call in a complaint to the city. In Stacked Decks, sociologist Robin Bartram introduces us to the people in Chicago who respond to those complaints, conduct inspections, and decide whether to cite buildings for code violations. Building inspectors, Bartram reveals, use their discretion as frontline workers in attempts to make their city less unequal. Yet, as she explains, their well-intentioned efforts typically fail to address deeper patterns of injustice. Stacked Decks offers important new insights into law's role in reproducing urban inequality, and a compelling call for structural reform.
Bartram introduces a helpful new vocabulary for interpreting urban inequality. In Chapter 1, she explains how residents experience cities as “stacked decks”—thanks to law and policy that systematically disadvantages certain classes of residents, such as renters and welfare recipients. Some readers might recognize an echo of “tilt,” the concept coined by critical legal scholars to describe pervasive bias in the legal system (e.g., Reference HoltHolt, 1984). Inspectors, Bartram explains, recognize the stacked deck and use their discretion to take “stabs at justice”—attempts to ameliorate inequality by going easy on owners deemed deserving, or stringently applying the code to others deemed less so. Such efforts, Bartram argues, often do not go far enough, since policies that serve as “justice blockers” prevent more meaningful change.
This frame informs the book's empirical chapters, which draw on an impressive range of data. Bartram interviewed dozens of building inspectors and rode along as they went about their own fieldwork. She observed how the city's building courts deal with alleged violations. And she analyzed city databases with a decade's worth of complaints, inspections, and their dispositions. Taken together, this provides a comprehensive landscape-level map of where building problems arise, as well as a deep, nuanced feel for how inspectors respond to complaints and assess conditions at individual buildings.
Three chapters describe how inspections work and explain how inspectors seek to address urban inequality. Chapter 2 tours Chicago, using geolocated complaint and violation data to map out where these cluster. We visit a few neighborhoods that illustrate the different issues that arise depending on the type of housing stock and whether buildings are owner-occupied or rented out. For urban scholars, sociologists in particular, Chicago will be familiar terrain, and the focus on how housing reproduces inequality will not be entirely new (Reference DesmondDesmond, 2016; Reference SullivanSullivan, 2018). But Bartram's tour demonstrates how the material conditions of housing shape inequality, how those conditions are determined by law and legal actors, and how this story both informs and is distinct from issues of access and affordability, which have been the focus of most other recent work on housing.
The following two chapters explain how inspectors address complaints concerning buildings owned by landlords and by homeowners. In Chapter 3, Bartram explains how inspectors evaluate complaints involving rental housing. Here, they conduct “relative assessments” that depend on the type of landlord: inspectors tend “to penalize big, professional companies, slumlords, and corner-cutters, and try to protect small-time landlords and family buildings” (77–78). Inspectors also see some renters as more sympathetic than others, but can do relatively little to help or hinder them, since the building code applies to owners.
Chapter 4 explains how inspectors approach complaints against owner-occupied buildings. Here, they again seek to identify owners who deserve compassion, and generally go easy on homeowners who are struggling to keep up on maintenance. They also look out for old-timers in gentrifying neighborhoods and are more skeptical of newcomers who might be flipping homes. Although they see the deck as stacked against homeowners in communities of color, the realities of disparate housing conditions limit their discretion, and they end up citing more buildings in those communities than in White neighborhoods.
Inspectors try on a case-to-case basis to address injustice, but as Bartram explains in Chapter 5, their impact is limited by “justice blockers,” or policies and practices that reproduce inequality despite stabs at justice. The fact that housing is treated as a market commodity means a record of violations may depress prices in a low-income community where inspectors might be inclined to go easy. Meanwhile, the large landlords who inspectors are more likely to go after may simply raise rents to pass on costs to tenants, resulting in displacement. When inspectors and building courts give homeowners extra time to bring their dwellings into compliance, that extends the process—which effectively becomes further punishment.
In the Conclusion, Bartram calls for policies that could “reshuffle the deck” and address these deeper injustices. Rent control regulations could prevent landlords from passing on the cost of violations. Housing choice vouchers could help protect tenants from rent hikes. Procedures in building court could be sped up.
Stacked Decks exposes the dynamics of a crucial but often unseen side of how housing in America is regulated. For sociolegal scholars, it shows how the duty to maintain property (Reference ShokedShoked, 2014) that exists on the books operates in action. This reveals that the progressive instinct to impose duties on owners can produce inequitable outcomes. The frontline workers who decide when to impose duties know this, and sometimes see nonenforcement as necessary to promote justice.
This important book should be of interest to scholars and students of housing, cities, and property. In addition, as extreme weather becomes the norm and makes our cities crumble ever faster, Stacked Decks will become essential reading for people concerned with urban climate justice.
