The COVID-19 pandemic is like a ruthless magnifying glass, exposing the vicious inequities at the core of our society. Those affected most have been the overlooked communities who had already been disproportionately struggling before the virus, like minorities, the urban and rural poor, the working class, prisoners, and the elderly. Unfortunately, due to a long-standing combination of systemic racism, disinvestment, and questionable policy decisions, the built environment around us exposes virtually the exact same inequities. In marginalized places, so many buildings—from public housing to schools to hospitals—are substandard, out-of-date, falling apart, or simply not built at all. These neighborhoods also suffer from uneven investments in public space, infrastructure, and basic services. There’s a dire cost: Unequal access to healthy, safe surroundings has been linked by study after study to higher instances of poverty, obesity, asthma, depression, traffic collisions, malnutrition, social fracture, and crime, and more pronounced impacts from environmental hazards like natural disasters, pollution, heat waves, and more.