Housing, Health, and the Danger Zone

An Organizing Roundtable with George Lipsitz

Abstract

In early June 2025, George Lipsitz joined a virtual roundtable with three housing organizers in Connecticut, convened by the statewide coalition Connecticut for All. Like many regions across the country, Connecticut is facing a profound housing crisis. Access to affordable, safe housing has long been sharply stratified along race and class lines. Black and Latina/o residents in Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven have historically been confined to segregated neighborhoods that bear the heaviest burdens of disinvestment as well as environmental toxins and other health hazards. By contrast, the white suburbs that envelop these communities often concentrate wealth and opportunity while remaining shielded from many of these harms.

 As Lipsitz documents in The Danger Zone Is Everywhere, these patterns are neither accidental nor benign. They are instead the inevitable expressions of a racialized capitalism that extracts surplus value and profit through the production and legitimation of racial domination and difference. The Zoom conversation, which drew nearly one hundred attendees consisting of organizers, tenant leaders, and elected officials from across the state, explored how the frameworks outlined in The Danger Zone Is Everywhere illuminate the struggles unfolding in Connecticut.