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The links between housing and health are now known to be strong and multifaceted and to generally span across 4 key pillars: stability, affordability, quality and safety, and neighborhood opportunity. Housing disparities in the United States are tenaciously patterned along axes of social inequality and contribute to the burden related to persistently adverse health outcomes in affected groups. Appreciating the multidimensional relationship between housing and health is critical in moving the housing and health agenda forward to inspire greater equity.
We assessed the current state of research on housing and health disparities, and we share recommendations for achieving opportunities for health equity centered on a comprehensive framing of housing.
Despite the vastness of existing research, we must contextualize the housing and health disparities nexus in a broader web of interrelated variables emerging from the same roots of structural inequalities. There is more we can do to maximize the extent to which existing research furthers our understanding of housing's relationship to health and potential related interventions; however, there are also several areas where new research is warranted. (Am J Public Health. 2019;109: 1363-1366. doi:10.2105/AJPH. 2019.305210)
The relationship between where people live and their health has received significant and growing attention in public health research in recent years in the United States.1-3 This attention is well merited considering the mounting burden that housing constitutes for many households in the United States, particularly so among disadvantaged groups. For instance, approximately half of renters overall, and 90% among those below the poverty line, spend more than 30% of their income on rent and are considered rent burdened.4,5 Homelessness remains at unacceptable levels. More than 550 000 Americans are homeless on any given day and 1.42 million US residents relied on an emergency shelter or transitional housing at some point in 2017.6 Displacement by evictions are increasingly commonplace, this following the foreclosure crisis of the late 2000s, which dispossessed millions of Americans from their homes.4
Public housing, intended as a primary bastion of affordability, faces an uncertain future because of decades of underfunding, deferred maintenance, and waning political support. Today, millions of public housing residents encounter poor physical conditions that compromise their health and safety and further limit access to affordable housing.7 In addition, a mere 25% of all...