Tag: housing

Blue stethoscope with gavel on white background

Equipping the Next Generation of Health Justice Leaders

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Yael Cannon

Health justice begins with exploring and understanding health disparities and the role of law in facilitating the social, political, and economic determinants at their roots. It requires naming structural racism — and the many forms of subordination that flow from it — as a public health crisis and recognizing that health justice is racial justice. Most importantly, health justice requires us to partner with affected communities to leverage law and policy to address and eliminate the root causes of disparities.

Those of us at schools of law and medicine, and other academic institutions who are training the next generation of lawyers, policy advocates and policymakers, doctors, nurses, and other health professionals have a special responsibility to equip our students with the knowledge, skills, and values they need to ensure that everyone has an equal chance at health and well-being.

Read More

Los Angeles, California / USA - May 28, 2020: People in Downtown Los Angeles protest the brutal Police killing of George Floyd.

Health Justice: Love, Freedom Dreaming, and Power Building

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Jamila Michener

“Justice is what love looks like in public.”

— Cornel West

Simple yet resonant, Cornel West’s rendering of justice draws on an emotion that most people understand on a deep personal level: love. Viewing health justice through the lens of love concretizes it when I am otherwise tempted to treat it as an abstract notion. Love is familiar, intuitive, and tangible. Conceptualizing health justice as a public enactment of love directs my thoughts to the people I cherish most dearly, bringing the reality of the concept into sharp relief.

What do I want for the people I love? Of course, I want them to have access to high-quality health care: primary care doctors, acute care physicians, specialists, nurses, therapists, local hospitals where they will be treated with dignity and much more.

Over and above these features of health care systems, I want the people I love to have the building blocks necessary for healthy living: safe and comfortable housing, nutritious food, supportive social relationships, jobs that offer a living wage, education, freedom from poverty, violence, and exploitation.

Going even further, I want the people I love to have the agency to shape their own lives and the capacity to chart paths in the communities they inhabit. In short, I want them to have power. Power facilitates all the things listed above (i.e., the social determinants of health) on a durable, equitable, and sustainable basis.

Read More

Scales of justice and gavel on table.

Symposium Introduction: Health Justice: Engaging Critical Perspectives in Health Law and Policy

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Ruqaiijah Yearby and Lindsay F. Wiley

Public health scholars, advocates, and officials have long recognized that factors outside an individual’s control act as barriers to individual and community health.

To strive for health equity, in which everyone “has the opportunity to attain . . . full health potential and no one is disadvantaged from achieving this potential because of social position or any other socially defined circumstance,” many have adopted the social determinants of health (SDOH) model, which identifies social and economic factors that shape health. Yet, health equity has remained elusive in the United States, in part because the frameworks that most prominently guide health reform do not adequately address subordination as the root cause of health inequity, focus too much on individuals, and fail to center community voices and perspectives.

The health justice movement seeks to fill these gaps. Based in part on principles from the reproductive justice, environmental justice, food justice, and civil rights movements, the health justice movement rejects the notion that health inequity is an individual phenomenon best explained and addressed by focusing on health-related behaviors and access to health care. Instead it focuses on health inequity as a social phenomenon demanding wide-ranging structural interventions.

This digital symposium, part of the Health Justice: Engaging Critical Perspectives in Health Law & Policy Initiative launched in 2020, seeks to further define the contours of and debates within the health justice movement and explore how scholars, activists, communities, and public health officials can use health justice frameworks to achieve health equity.

Read More

Blue house in grass field.

Community-Based Response to Intimate Partner Violence During COVID-19 Pandemic

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Leigh Goodmark

Intimate partner violence has been called “a pandemic within the pandemic.”

A study of fourteen American cities found that the number of domestic violence calls to law enforcement rose 9.7% in March and April 2020, compared to the previous year. A hospital-based study spanning the same time period found significant increases in the number of people treated for injuries related to intimate partner violence. And a 2021 review of 18 studies relying on data from police, domestic violence hotlines, and health care providers found that reports of intimate partner violence increased 8% after lockdown orders were imposed.

Although almost half of people subjected to abuse never call the state for assistance, our responses to intimate partner violence are largely embedded within the state and rely heavily on law enforcement. A disproportionate amount of funding under the Violence Against Women Act — by one estimate, 85% — is directed to the criminal legal system. A growing number of activists skeptical of state intervention are arguing that responses beyond the carceral state are essential.

The pandemic showed that community-based supports, like pod mapping, mutual aid, and community accountability, originally developed by activists critical of law enforcement responses to violence, can foster safety and accountability without requiring state intervention. The pandemic could spur advocates seeking to distance themselves from state-based responses to expand their services.

Read More

Gavel and a house on a white background. Concept art for eviction.

Eviction Moratorium Cases Reveal Courts’ Misunderstanding of Public Health

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Mahathi Vemireddy and Faith Khalik

Amid the COVID-19 Delta variant surge, the federal eviction moratorium — a key public health protection — will soon expire, and faces tough prospects for extension due to a series of legal battles.

These legal challenges highlight a narrow — and dangerous — conception of public health held by some courts, one which fails to recognize how social conditions such as housing can compound the impact of a virus. To protect our nation’s health, this misunderstanding of public health must be remedied.

Read More

Houses.

New Data on Eviction Laws Opens Doors for Evaluation

Temple University Center for Public Health Law Research Leave a comment

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an eviction crisis in the United States. Estimates suggest landlords across the country file 3.7 million eviction cases each year — leaving considerable impacts on health and well-being in their wake. 

The eviction process is regulated by a patchwork of state/territory and local laws and court rules that govern the judicial process, but little is known about the ways in which these laws affect the likelihood of evictions.  

A new database, launched by the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) in partnership with the Center for Public Health Law Research, captures the entire eviction legal process, from pre-filing to post-judgment, in different communities around the country.  

The data provide early insights, including: 

Read More

Emergency room.

Worsening Health Inequity During Pandemic for People Experiencing Homelessness

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

This piece was adapted from a post that originally ran at On the Flying Bridge on March 28, 2021.

By Michael Greeley

With great fanfare last week, DoorDash announced an initiative to provide same-day home delivery of approved COVID-19 test collection kits.

Much of the business model innovation in health care today is to move as much care as is feasible to the home. But what does that mean for the homeless?

Read More

Gavel and a house on a white background. Concept art for eviction.

Why Biden’s Extension of the Eviction Moratorium Isn’t Enough

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Molly Prothero

On President Joe Biden’s first day in office, he signed an executive order calling on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to extend its federal eviction moratorium through March 2021.

But this action protects only a subset of tenants who meet specific qualifications and, crucially, know to fill out a CDC Affidavit and submit it to their landlords. And despite skyrocketing COVID-19 case counts, most state eviction moratoriums have now lifted, leaving tenants vulnerable to displacement and homelessness.

Read More

Close-up of a stethoscope on an American flag

Why Justice is Good for America’s Health

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Dayna Bowen Matthew

Justice is good for health [and] . . . health is the byproduct of justice.

— Norman Daniels, Bruce Kennedy & Ichiro Kawachi (Boston Review, 2000)

Among the most salient lessons to be learned from the coronavirus pandemic are that unjust laws produce unjust health outcomes, and that justice is just plain good for America’s health.

Health justice is the moral mandate to protect and advance an equal opportunity for all to enjoy greatest health and well-being possible. Health justice means that no one person or group of people are granted or excluded from the means of pursuing health on an inequitable basis. To achieve health justice, societal institutions such as governments and health care providers must act to advance equality, by increasing fairness and decreasing unfairness of their current and historic impacts on populations.

Read More

redlined map of Los Angeles.

A Critical Race Perspective on Housing and Health

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment
Image from “Mapping Inequality,” American Panorama, ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers.

By Courtney Anderson

Only 10-20% of health outcomes are attributed to health care. Social, economic, and environmental factors thus account for the vast majority of population and individual health outcomes. And housing encompasses many of these factors, as it largely determines the built environment and exposure to stressors.

Section 801 of the Fair Housing Act declares, “It is the policy of the United States to provide, within constitutional limitations, for fair housing throughout the United States.” This Act was the culmination of racial justice protests, resistance to discrimination and violence, and other aspects of the civil rights movement. Despite the stated intention of this Act, housing remains unequal across the nation.

Read More