At Home: Black Women’s Collective Claims to Environmentally Just Rental Housing

Abstract

Environmental injustices have shaped how urban communities of color access, interact with, and are affected by indoor and outdoor environments in their daily lives. This includes access to and control of outdoor spaces, such as gardens, vacant neighborhood lots, and green spaces for growing food and plants and for coming together. For tenants in rented homes, it too often includes exposure to harmful indoor environments, such as toxic molds, rodent infestations, lead paint, broken heaters, and other unsafe and uncomfortable living conditions. Although geographers of race, nature, and environment have attended to rental housing through studies of green gentrification and racialized displacement, they have paid less attention to homes themselves and the survivability of Black women through everyday practices of resistance and placemaking. This community coauthored article focuses on Dubuque, Iowa—a predominately White, small Midwestern U.S. city with a growing Black population—and examines the cooperative practices of Black women tenants and community activists in pressing the municipal government to hold landlords responsible for living conditions in private rental homes. Together, they are working through institutional policy and procedural hurdles to confront anti-Blackness, cocreate livable urban environments, and “stay put” in the midst of gentrifying neighborhood revitalization plans.