Last year, the deadly fire that broke out in London's Grenfell apartment tower killed 71 people. The cause was linked to cladding that wasn't code compliant, and other laspses in regulation. But Robin Bartram, incoming professor of sociology at Tulane University, says there's more to the story, and more must be done to stop future tragedies like this one from happening.
Bartram writes:
Instead of simply increasing regulation and inspections, governments must remove the opportunity for exploitative profit by insisting on rent controls, providing subsidies for necessary repair work, and re-upping their role—both in ownership and management—of housing, before we are dealing with dire situations.
In addition, my research shows that if municipalities do not invest in housing, even the best of intentions can perpetuate housing inequality. I learned this after three years of researching housing inspections in Chicago. Consistent with other studies, I saw inspectors’ ire at negligent landlords. One inspector told me that after his 20 years of inspecting deplorable living conditions, he prays for some landlords to go to “landlord hell.” Inspectors act on their anger by doling out as many building code citations as possible and insisting that landlords fix them. Quantitative analyses of ten years of citation data back this up: Inspectors give out more citations to large rental properties that they think are poorly managed. They do try to penalize bad landlords.
But my research also illuminates the unintended consequences of these well-intended actions: rent hikes. My statistical analysis of over 280,000 building code citations and five years of rental data verifies that every citation and violation that is then fixed is associated with a 5.4 percent rent increase, a number that is consistent when normed across properties of the same age, size, value, and neighborhood.
Yes, investing in housing will cost money. But new proactive inspections won’t come cheap either. Housing activists could lobby governments to invest in housing instead of calling for increases in its regulation. Additional regulation—even if well-intended—will only perpetuate housing inequality, unless municipalities remove the opportunity for exploitative profit by insisting on rent control and providing subsidies for necessary repair work to existing housing. Governments need to choose investment as an alternative path to increased regulation. Most fundamentally, municipalities must invest in housing. Investment could mean subsidizing repairs, rent controls, or building and managing more state housing.
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