In 2010, Tess Lea and Paul Pholeros (who co-founded Healthabitat), published ‘This is not a pipe: The treacheries of Indigenous housing’ in the journal Public Culture. It’s a great analysis of public perceptions of and responses to Indigenous housing – how when confronted with evidence of systemic failure, we instead blame residents.
[E]ndemic overcrowding (or high-use load) contributes to rapid wear and tear, and since much Aboriginal housing is cheaply constructed, repair and maintenance issues quickly become a problem. This has a series of material effects. On the one hand, intermittent maintenance exacerbates degradation of housing stock. On the other, it swiftly creates a visual image of mess and decrepitude that, like the portrait of a pipe, invokes an interpretive automaticity for the remediating viewer. The unkempt house [instantly] represents a lack of householder pride that becomes the portmanteau explanation for the substandard nature of Indigenous housing stock.