Legacy repair is the recognition that a standing architecture inherits the accumulated injuries of the ecology it replaces. Decades of deprivation, trauma, addiction, institutional failure, poor health, incarceration, and isolation leave people who need far more support than a system designed around standing from the start would ever have had to provide — long-term supportive housing, treatment, care, intensive case management, supported decision-making, repeated attempts rather than one. That some participants may never become conventionally self-sufficient is not evidence standing is unworkable; it is the transition carrying legacy damage.
A society moving toward standing does not begin with a clean population. It inherits the accumulated injuries of the ecology it replaces.
The doctrine’s decisive clause is the second half: repair must carry the cost of historical failure while the new system stops manufacturing equivalent damage. Without it, a society spends indefinitely repairing harm it is still producing. Repair is therefore a bounded transition category, and its true cost is visible only when measured against what the old system already spends through emergency care, policing, incarceration, and crisis services, rather than against an imagined zero.