Health equity in housing can be defined as the absence of disadvantage to individuals and communities in health outcomes, access to health and social services, and quality of health and social services based on a person’s dwelling or neighborhood.
Lack of housing access, poor housing conditions, and income or racial segregation all have been shown empirically to cause negative health outcomes. Law has a pervasive role in housing, and has for a long time. Law was instrumental in creating and maintaining segregation through mechanisms like red-lining, restrictive covenants and zoning. The Civil Rights movement brought an end to explicitly discriminatory policies, and new finance and inclusionary zoning policies helped create millions of units of affordable housing, but we still have a long way to go. As Matthew Desmond’s work shows, drastic improvements are needed in how governments enforce housing codes and balance the rights of landlords and tenants. The bottom line is that too many of our people have trouble affording decent housing in neighborhoods with the amenities for healthy living, and too many of our neighborhoods are still segregated.
Our team at the Center for Public Health Law Research has been selected as a research hub in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Policies for Action Program. For the next 20 months, we will be using empirical research and legal scholarship to analyze the housing crisis through the lens of law. We know that law shapes environments and behaviors, so we are searching for the links between laws, their intended and unintended effects on the housing market, and the health outcomes that follow. We will be bringing a focus on law and its mechanisms to a field rich in policy research. Our aim is to investigate how law influences health equity in housing, and offer recommendations about how it can be a lever for greater equity. We hope to engage the community of non-profits, advocacy groups, policy think-tanks, and social scientists who are working on identifying problems and finding solutions, as well as the community of legal scholars and litigators working on housing issues. In our recommendations we plan on both identifying steps to incrementally advance housing equity through existing law, and envisioning creative changes to the legal framework itself.
We are excited to engage the housing policy and the law community in a discussion about legal levers for health equity through housing. We also look forward to sharing our work with you as we go, here and on the Policies for Action website. Please stay tuned!
If you are interested in continuing this discussion please reach out to Abraham Gutman at Abraham.gutman@temple.edu
