I was Brutally Mauled by Bad Housing Policy
Renovating is dangerous
I came across this tweet a while ago:
In the conversation preceding it, this user was pointing out a common theme in pitbull discourse where an overly defensive pitbull owner later gets mauled by their own dog. YIMBY discourse is quite tame by comparison.
Except I have been injured as a result of my local government’s bad housing policy.
This all started last year, when my husband and I decided to renovate a decaying pile of garbage that was built during the McKinley administration. I’ve spent the last year and a half trying to get it into a livable state.
The first injury was early on in the process, on November 12, 2024. I was demoing some ceiling drywall. When the drywall board unexpectedly detached from the ceiling, it bent back my right thumb and tore a ligament in my hand. I spent over a month with the thumb of my dominant hand in a Spica cast. I ended up needing two months of physical therapy. A year later, it’s about 98% healed, but it’s probably never going to be 100% again. I will almost certainly develop arthritis in that joint 20 years from now.
The second time was May 9, 2025. While I was on my way out the front door and my back was turned, a 2x4 piece of lumber fell on me. It hit me on the shoulder and grazed the back of my head. I got a concussion and nerve inflammation in the ulnar nerve of my left arm, which required months of PT and several scans to address.1
Why did we buy this house in the first place? Because I wanted to live in a walkable streetcar suburb, and this was the house we could afford. Everything wrong with it was priced in. Location, location, location.
But “location” is just a piece of dirt. There’s no physical reason why I had to deal with the house on this piece of dirt. Bulldozing my house and rebuilding it from scratch would have been easier, faster, cheaper, safer, and resulted in a more structurally sound home, built to modern building standards, with a better floorplan. All around better.
Why didn’t we do this? Because it’s illegal. Our house is too close to the property line to be rebuilt in its current spot without a zoning variance—and we don’t have enough political capital to get one.2
So instead, I’ve been trying to rebuild it. We’re almost done. At the end of it, we will have a somewhat livable, somewhat safe home that will still have uneven floors, a crumbling foundation, a crappy bathroom layout, and mold behind the walls that I did my best to remediate. It will not be “good”—merely adequate.
Renovating houses in general is dangerous, but renovating old houses is especially dangerous. By taking out the original lath-and-plaster walls, I was disturbing over a century of ancient dust and debris. I was lucky in that my plaster walls predated the time when everybody was putting asbestos in plaster, but I still had to contend with everything else. When I took down the ceilings, decades of soot, dust, and mouse poop that had accumulated within the ceiling cavities spilled out onto the floor. This was thick, black dust and soot from the old gaslighting system that had been in the house before they installed electric lighting.3 Yes, I always wore a P100 respirator. But respirators are not perfect. I don’t know how much I shaved off my lifespan by doing this.
I’m fortunate in that I’ve come out of all this relatively unscathed. It could have been so much worse. A couple of inches to one side or the other, and that 2x4 could have easily broken my neck. I got lucky.
I’m just a homeowner. I’m doing this as a one-off project, and I don’t do this for a living. But I hired contractors for a lot of the work, and they do do this for a living. These guys have been working in these types of environments for years, and it shows. They’re not ok. They’re not healthy. Some of them wear masks and PPE while they work, but most don’t.
There is a real human cost to bad housing policy. It doesn’t just make our housing more expensive. It doesn’t just devolve our neighborhoods into car-dependent suburban sprawl. Dealing with old housing that can’t be torn down carries an actual, concrete, danger-to-one’s-health cost, that is far and away more significant than that of new construction.
Yes, it was the same physical therapy practice both times. After dealing with my hand injury, I “graduated” from PT, and the therapists there wished me well. When I returned a few months later for the shoulder injury, I greeted everybody at the practice: “Hi guys! New injury!” They took it in stride.
It’s a single family home, but built towards one side of the lot instead of in the center. This leaves enough space for a driveway on the side of the house. When the house was first built over a hundred years ago, it would’ve had a free-standing garage in the back yard, with the side driveway providing access. That garage has long-since been torn down.
Don’t try to gaslight me about how much my house sucks—it had actual gaslighting! (No, the lines were not still active.)