Going Easy and Going After: Building Inspections and the Selective Allocation of Code Violations

Abstract

Sociologists have demonstrated how public and private actors reproduce economic and racial inequality, by protecting the values of lucrative real estate, enforcing the tastes of elite and middle‐class populations, and unfavorably sorting low‐income and minority residents. Building inspections and code violations affect each of these processes. Yet, we know remarkably little about how decisions about building code violations are made. Drawing on fieldwork with building inspectors and statistical analysis of data on building violations in Chicago, I find that building inspectors allocate code violations in surprising ways: They go easy on low‐ and moderate‐income property owners and go after professional landlords and wealthy homeowners. I join others in urging sociologists to look beyond assumptions about the unified logic of the growth machine and fully unpack the relationship—in terms of potential and parameters—between frontline agents of the state and inequality.

“Not Just a Lateral Move”: Residential Decisions and the Reproduction of Urban Inequality

“…We are in the process of including some of this in our work in Baltimore, 49 and are encouraged by emerging research in this area by others (cf. Bartram 2019; Besbris 2020; Korver‐Glenn 2018). Lastly, while we spent time with a diverse sample of families in Dallas and Cleveland, our sample sizes did not always allow for analyses of race, income, and social class subgroups (e.g.…”

“We Go Totally Subjective”: Discretion, Discrimination, and Tenant Screening in a Landlord’s Market

“…These findings broadly underscore lessons from sociolegal scholarship regarding the indeterminate and sometimes counterproductive effects of legal efforts to advance equity by regulating the decision-making powers of individual agents. The findings regarding landlords' legal adaptation strategies comport with organizational and social-psychological research in the employment setting demonstrating that policies that either restrict managerial discretion or their access to candidate information can provoke behavior that undermines the equity goals of those policies (Dobbin, Schrage, and Kalev 2015;Agan and Starr 2017;Doleac and Hansen 2016) as well as recent sociological research documenting the extent to which landlords pass on the costs of regulation to their tenants (Greif 2018;Bartram 2019). In line with sociolegal arguments regarding the limitations of compliance standards for antidiscrimination law that focus on institutional decision-making processes rather than measurable effects or outcomes (Pedriana and Styrker 2017), recent tenant screening regulations create new rules for landlords' screening and selection procedures but, ultimately, do not mandate who landlords select as renters.…”

Uncovering commercial activity in informal cities

“…Zoning plans have been widely used as a tool for managing urban growth. But it has been pointed out that the enforcement is many times selective (74), that it can reinforce inequality and related dynamics (74,75), and that there is generally a large amount of non conformance to the plans (76). Problematically, non adherence to zoning restrictions is usually associated to poorer neighbourhoods further complicating the debate (77).…”