bad bones
& forced birth revenge fantasies
When the sign goes up outside the house, saying Keep Parking Clear for DC Water because of planned work to replace lead pipes, I’m scared it might mean we’ve been drinking water shuttled to us in lead pipes, so I look up a map from DC Water and am comforted to see the text, Verified Non-Lead; there was a procedure done, April of this year. (This year!) The people who we’re subletting from have a baby. I wonder if that was the impetus to get the pipes replaced — her. The couple who we are renting from for the rest of the summer tell us not to open the windows in their sunlit, white-walled house. The A/C is always running in the summer, says the man, a gentle bearded professor, and besides, there is lead paint in the casement window frames. We have young kids, he adds apologetically. If the windows are opened, the paint, already chipping off, might be further disturbed and enter the house.
In our current house ($1.4 million on Zillow) we take cell phone photos of water damage on the ceiling — big sepia stains like spilled coffee — and try to answer our landlords’ questions, whether we think it’s gotten better or worse since May. I look up Google Images of water damage in houses and learn that bubbling in a wall can mean leaking. I spot what I think is bubbling, send a picture of that too.
We are renting from well-off people who live in a leafy neighborhood of expensive houses, where sometimes nannies with accents walk blue-eyed children in strollers to the school that has a community garden. Yet there are lead pipes and paint and leaking roofs. You can imagine how it would be a thousand times worse for homeowners who don’t have the money to spend on contractors who can come out and do expensive roof repairs and lead abatement, or renters with abusive or negligent landlords. You don’t have to imagine, either. A White House fact sheet says up to 10 million American households connect to water through lead pipes and service lines. Redlining and other discriminatory housing practices have shunted Black Americans into poorer neighborhoods with crumbling infrastructure; research on pediatric health has found living in racially segregated neighborhoods puts Black children at a higher risk of having elevated blood lead levels.
When I lived in the Bay I sometimes went on long runs through the tony Claremont neighborhood of Berkeley, past palatial mansions and the gleaming jewel on the hill that was the Claremont Club and Spa. When I read Richard Rothstein’s book The Color of Law I learned that many of those beautiful Claremont homes had been bought and sold with racial covenants attached — stipulations that only white people could live there. (More on Claremont here.) It was easy to resent that posh neighborhood as I went running past its shuttered windows and closed doors. Harder to remember that we were privileged to be able to live in Berkeley at all, when so many people who worked in the Bay had turned to living hours away and super-commuting because of the unaffordability of housing.
In the invincibility or unknowing of youth we paid little attention to the ways our homes failed us. In 2015, there was the highly publicized tragedy of an improperly constructed balcony collapsing, killing several Irish students. People talked about how their balconies might be suspect and kept using them. Occasionally a responsible property management company might do a seismic retrofit. We didn’t know what that meant, really. A friend said the type of building I lived in, with a hollowed-out ground floor for parking, was liable to cave in if the Big One hit. Oh really? I said, dispassionately watching a GIF of the process. Everyone I knew lived in a building like that: on Haste, on Hillegass, on Ridge. A lot of them rented from property companies owned by a real estate tycoon and convicted human trafficker. In college my then-partner lived in a shabby apartment owned by a chain-smoking, taciturn man whose yearly response to the scourge of black mold was to paint over it with a new coat of white paint. Eventually the mold would come back to the surface, no matter how much bleach you used or how faithfully you ran the dehumidifier or kept all the windows open (so the exhalation and body heat of three young men in a small apartment wouldn’t rise and condense on the windows and drip onto the moldering curtains). One of the boys said he got frostbite on a toe because of how cold it got in the apartment with the window open. We all made fun of him. You can live like this when you’re 19 or 20 and about to leave that apartment for massively better digs (frostbite boy works in tech and writes blog posts about how to invest when you’re playing around with upwards of $500k). But it is no kind of place to make a life.
Homes, these private places, have public consequences.
Gas and propane stoves are linked with childhood asthma, because they destroy indoor air quality by raising the amount of nitrogen dioxide in the air. That decrease in indoor air quality sucks for adults, too.
Lead exposure — which could come not just from pipes and paint but contaminated soil, like in a garden that’s been subjected to runoff from a lead-painted house for many years — contributes to cognitive damage and a host of other issues.
Mold and mildew is obviously bad for you too :)
Engineered stone is a popular choice for many kitchen counters — in fact, I just spotted engineered stone (Caesarstone) in this NYTimes trend piece of an architect couple’s Orcas Island house — but they destroy the lungs of the workers who cut them. Please read that LATimes story and send it to anyone you know who is doing home renovation, or knows anyone who is. At the top is a picture of a man who has incurable silicosis and is hooked up to an oxygen tank now. He’s just 27. Australia became the first country in the world to ban the use, supply, and manufacture of engineered stone because of how horrible this is for workers. There, members of highly organized and empowered trade unions worked with doctors and activists to achieve the ban. But many of the people who are cutting engineered stone in the U.S. aren’t organized in unions, and may be highly vulnerable due to immigration status (and even more f’ed over by the health consequences, without adequate access to social services).
What if we saw homes not as private responsibility but as public infrastructure?
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I just read Henry Grabar’s book Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, which I would super recommend to anyone interested in cities/density/planning/housing but also anybody who has a car and has ever complained about finding parking.
I also read Shefali Luthra’s Undue Burden: Life and Death Decisions in Post-Roe America, a heartrending book that made me so angry at every politician who has ever curtailed abortion access i.e. championed FORCED BIRTHS (I hope they all get dysentery right now and have it for 9 months. Or a giant lipoma on their back that keeps growing and growing and pressing on all their organs and every surgeon will be like, nah, I can’t take it out until it will literally kill you, soz!!!)
image: Cezanne’s “House with Cracked Walls”