2025/01/22 by Max Besbris · 1 voice
Health Professions · Social Sciences · #Employment and Welfare Studies #Homelessness and Social Issues #Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies
paper · doi:10.1093/sf/soaf007
openalex publication_date 2025/01/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
George Lipsitz is a distinguished thinker whose writings on collective memory, White identity, and race and place have influenced a generation of scholars, including me. What has made his numerous books particularly appealing is his dedication to using theoretical frameworks developed in the Black Radical Tradition, and to highlighting the practical work of non-academics in fighting racism, exploitation, and displacement. His powers of perception and synthesis remain potent in his new book, The Danger Zone is Everywhere: How Housing Discrimination Harms Health and Steals Wealth, which argues for understanding racial health disparities as resulting from various housing and neighborhood-based processes. These include housing market discrimination, unequal lending, insuring, and appraisal practices, foreclosure and eviction, over-policing and mass incarceration, and segregation more broadly, which creates unequal exposure to toxic hazards and unequal access to healthcare. The book is a righteous polemic against the state of America’s housing markets and healthcare systems, though it is not always clear about the mechanisms that link the myriad racial-spatial practices it describes to health outcomes. More glaringly, the book does not thoroughly engage with research in the environmental justice tradition—a line of thinking largely developed by non-White scholars focused on questions of racially unequal exposures to environmental hazards. Yet despite these shortcomings, The Danger Zone is Everywhere serves as a helpful and broad guide to the literatures on race and housing, while pointing to models for reducing inequalities via existing social movements and organizations that are mitigating harm and fostering community.