Cleansing Properties: The Commodification of Dirty Work in Low-Income Housing

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Abstract

The question of how society does its “dirty work,” remains an enduring one across many institutional settings. Scholars recently have mobilized this concept to explain why market-based reforms and commodification don’t always go as planned. While these studies illustrate dirty work as an obstacle to reform success, I argue that dirty work occupations often serve a valuable societal purpose and social policy role, which raises an entirely different set of questions about how commodification transforms the occupational lives of dirty workers. Drawing on economic sociology, I argue that commoditizing reforms create new economic opportunities that serve to make dirty work less dirty, with ambiguous consequences for members of dirty work occupations. I use the example of low-income housing development to illustrate its transformation from a dirty work occupation to a highly profitable industry and financial asset base. Using interviews and other supplementary methods, I show that this transformation has been driven by financial sector investment and valuation practices. This reform culminates in what is now the nation’s premier housing production program: the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. While the financial commodification of low-income housing has increased access to capital for low-income properties, however, the changing conceptions of honor that fuel dirty work and shifting evaluative standards that police it increasingly penalize the smaller community developers who inspired the tax credit approach in the first place.

Author

• John N. Robinson, Northwestern University