Abstract
Inspecting the physical quality of homes is a straightforward job. Building inspectors respond to public complaints and determine whether a property's conditions violate the city's building code. Leaning decks, mold, and downed fences present obvious violations to which inspectors respond by serving a property owner a violation notice, requiring the owner to appear in building court, or assigning the property to an administrative hearing. It's a cut-and-dry system with clear rules and little room for discretion. At least that's how the job appears to casual observers.
Discretion, it turns out, characterizes nearly every decision made by inspectors. In choosing the violations they cite, which tasks they require homeowners to complete in building court testimonies, and whether to recommend a property for the harsh recourse of an administrative hearing, inspectors are influenced by their perceptions of a neighborhood's trajectory and an owner's worthiness of leniency. By coming down hard on wealthy corporate landlords and offering struggling families in impoverished areas extra time to complete needed repairs, inspectors apply their own sense of justice to the properties they visit.
In Stacked Decks: Building Inspectors and the Reproduction of Urban Inequality, Robin Bartram distills a combination of extensive qualitative fieldwork and statistical analyses into an intimate view of the attitudes, work activities, and governing bureaucratic systems of inspectors in Chicago's Buildings Department. In the book's terminology, inspectors understand and respond to the stacked decks—including poverty and discrimination on one hand, and affluence and privilege on the other—that produce inequality in urban communities by taking stabs at justice. The definition and application of justice are shaped by inspectors’ largely similar blue-collar backgrounds and the rules of thumb passed down by department veterans. While inspectors are well-meaning, their attempts at justice are often met by justice blockers such as lingering violations that cloud a property's title or poverty that prevents owners from affording repairs, which can render inspectors’ actions ineffective or even harmful to floundering property owners.
After introducing the book's conceptual frame, Bartram offers a summary of the social, economic, and historical factors that have produced Chicago's inequality-laden urban fabric in Chapter 1. While Chicago's neighborhood disparities have received ample scholarly attention, Bartram provides readers with a new lens highlighting the way building code violations and inspectors’ responses to them have factored into the story. Chapter 2 connects inspectors’ perceptions of Chicago's inequality to their responses to building code-related complaints. Here, we first encounter one of the book's strengths, Bartram's skillful interplay between a city-wide statistical analyses and quotations from interviews and ride-alongs with inspectors. Chapters 3 and 4, which detail inspectors’ responses to violations in the rental and homeownership markets, respectively, contain the richest qualitative data from Bartram's fieldwork, revealing inspectors’ partiality toward family-owners and frequent inability to improve conditions for tenants. Chapter 5 gives readers a front row seat in Chicago's building court, which Bartram uses to illustrate how inspectors’ attempts to affect justice by being lenient to honest but struggling owners are often blocked or even rendered damaging by the system's structural biases. The conclusion offers an overview of existing and proposed solutions to the way building inspections further inequality in Chicago. The most interesting of these include creating temporary housing options for tenants whose buildings require repairs and institutionalizing the input of tenants’ unions into the building repairs process.
Joining other recent works of urban sociology such as Korver-Glenn's (2021) study of home appraisers and Becher's (2014) work on eminent domain, Bartram centers the role of municipal frontline workers and municipal-level legal systems in shaping the built environment both physically and socioeconomically. Given its narrow focus on inspectors, Stacked Decks is most suitable as a teaching tool for graduate-level urban planning or urban sociology courses focused on housing and neighborhood change. It would also make a fine addition to any urban planning or sociology library, especially for those interested in discretion's role in municipal governance.
Stacked Decks has several noteworthy strengths, including its elevation of the voices of female sociologists, and its focus on both white affluent neighborhoods and underserved communities of color rather than solely focusing on the latter. The book is well written, with concise language and a clear, effective structure. It's also a fun read, as the colorful personalities of inspectors are as entertaining as they are educational. One argument Bartram could have made more convincingly was the claim that the actions of inspectors not only harm individuals and communities of color, but have a corresponding benefit for white, affluent neighborhoods. The author's discussion of inspectors’ white blind spots leaves the reader with little doubt inspectors harbor this attitude, but additional examples of how these views manifested in the field would have strengthened the book. Additionally, the book's introduction would benefit from a broader description of the building inspection industry in other U.S. cities.
In the end, Bartram leaves the reader wanting more—in a good way. A single book can only accomplish so much, and a review of the appendix reveals that Bartram has also collected data from community meetings and interviews with local politicians that do not factor significantly into this work. Ideally, Bartram will use these data to offer students and scholars of urban inequality another view into the factors shaping Chicago's variegated neighborhoods. Like building inspectors visiting a property, we all use discretion in choosing which books to place on our shelves; including Bartram's excellent work is an easy decision.