Report Publish Date: August 2022
This issue brief describes efforts to advance housing justice in places participating in RWJF’s Sentinel Communities Surveillance project.
Communities are responding to challenges such as a lack of safe and affordable housing; racial segregation and housing and health disparities caused by discriminatory housing and lending practices; and evictions and displacement caused by high rent and income loss.
Communities are working to improve affordable housing options. They have created task forces and coalitions to promote housing stability. And they are creating new housing policies that give people more housing options and improve living conditions.
Government and community programs and funding, especially pandemic relief funds, helped improve access to safe and stable housing.
Begun in 2016, RWJF’s Sentinel Communities Surveillance project tracks how a Culture of Health is developing in 29 communities across the country. The authors wanted to know how communities are advancing housing justice.
The authors gathered information from phone interviews with Sentinel Community leaders; online, published, and local materials and media about the communities; and data sources including the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, County Health Rankings, and state and local data collection systems.
The researchers used examples from the following communities: Allegheny County, Penn.; Baltimore, Md.; Butte, Mont.; Danvers, Mass.; Finney County, Kan.; Harris County, Texas; Louisville, Ky.; Maricopa County, Ariz.; Midland, Texas; Milwaukee, Wis.; Mobile, Ala,; Monona County, Iowa; New Haven, Conn.; North Central Nebraska; San Juan County, N.M.; Tacoma, Wash.; Tampa, Fla.; and Toledo, Ohio.
"Going forward, it will be important to assess whether efforts related to housing justice begin to tackle deeper, more entrenched challenges related to discriminatory policies and practices that have resulted in inequities in housing and health.”
—RAND Corporation
“The examples in this report highlight the challenges Sentinel Communities face with respect to housing justice and strategies they have used to help address many of those challenges,” the authors write.
Access to safe, secure, stable, and affordable housing is critically important
for the health of people and communities. Decades of research have identified the health impacts of substandard and unsafe housing and crowding on infectious and chronic diseases, lead poisoning, injuries, and mental health. In communities across the country, many families struggle to afford housing—forgoing healthy food or medical care to pay rent or mortgages, and experiencing stress at the threat of eviction or foreclosure—all impacting physical and mental health. Neighborhood factors including air and water quality, walkability, safety, and access to amenities like healthy food and recreational activities contribute to health outcomes, prompting a widely adopted understanding that one’s zip code is as important as one’s genetic code. Such neighborhood factors also contribute to other aspects of one’s community known to influence health and well-being, including trust, social cohesion, and collective efficacy.
Yet, who has access to safe, secure, and stable housing is not equitably distributed. Many people, particularly Black, Latino, and Indigenous people, often face housing inequities due to generations of discriminatory housing and lending practices, including redlining and housing segregation. Gentrification and a lack of safe and affordable housing options have contributed to displacement. Land use policies and environmental injustice have also shaped economic trajectories and opportunities for wealth-building, as lower-income individuals and families are priced out of the housing market and forced to move to lower-resourced or less-healthy communities in search of affordable housing. Such communities, however, often have fewer high-quality jobs and may lack a robust public transportation system, making employment and housing stability difficult to maintain.
This report discusses housing justice in a sample of the Sentinel Communities, including specific housing challenges individuals and communities face; how communities are addressing these challenges; the role of federal and state dollars and policies in shaping housing justice within the communities; and barriers and facilitators to housing justice locally. The report provides insight into the issues related to housing justice in these communities but is not intended to be representative of the full extent of challenges people and communities are facing or the solutions being implemented. The insights for this report come from environmental scans and stakeholder interviews conducted for the Sentinel Communities Surveillance Project.
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, August 2022
This study and report was conducted and created by the following people.
