Consistency of Housing and Impact on Health

Feeling low? kick a football! Life got you down? Pot a plant! A recent study from AustraliaTry: Too Many Aussie Homeless? Yes! Even More Shocking: The Rate They Die! suggests...

Recently a study from Australia delivered some shocking news: should you be unhoused, your expected lifespan is about half that of that which housed citizens enjoyTry: Too Many Aussie...

"Civil government . . . is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have...

Research in the United States has been connecting safe, stable affordable housing with health care. This post is the second in a short series about how the research is...

Research in the United States has pinpointed connections between safe, stable affordable housing with health careFor example, try: Connecting The Housing And Health Dots. This post is the first...

A housing project with wraparound supports opened in London, Ontario six months ago. There are 24 residents in the first phase. The local hospital contributed CDN$2M to the project. The...

Health researchers pay relentless attention to population healthPopulation health involves the study of morbidity (illness) and mortality, statistics that have been collected for a long time. Population health includes...

Have you ever had a foot injury? If you have, you will know how it can limit your mobility. Now imagine that the only way you have to get around...

In a world of self-reliance, the Baby Boom (postwar) generation is aging out self-care. The future has arrived. Your retirement planning, if it even exists, was locked in during an...

Scientific discoveries are flying thick and fast these days. News about AI and ChatGBT are getting a lot of media coverage, but we'd like to draw your attention to...

People who experience homelessness have a lot to contend with. Where will they go to eat, sleep, get clean, do laundry? With these basics up in the air, it's...

In bald terms, hospitals have a mission to patch you up and get you out the door. It is not an ideal environment for someone who is dying. This...

Affordablehousingaction.org recently highlighted two articles about homeless outreach teams operated by local governments in North America. One was based on a research from the United States, which found that...

The Canadian Housing Survey was launched in 2018 as part of Canada's National Housing Strategy. It gives researchers and the public new insights into Canada's housing market. It is thanks...

Mobility seems all the rage at the moment. We posted about an aborted attempt to provide mobile off-street sleeping for the people who are homeless in Rhode IslandTry: Mobile...

A great deal of so-called 'woke' energy around the world has been mobilizing to demand more recognition for 'trans' rights, together with legal mechanisms to create a physical and...

The COVID pandemic resulted in a profound change — temporarily at least — in the way that homeless citizens were treated world-wide. Was it because communities were overwhelmed by...

Spend money to end homelessness? Doing so will actually make more money than is spent. Isn't that the kind of fever-dream that propels gambling addicts until they become bankrupt? Nevertheless,...

Shelby R. King, writing in Shelterforce, asks whether an investment firm that owns residential property and regularly evicts its tenants should be eligible for the coveted B CorpB Corp is a...

The latest fad(?) in solving homeless problems has been dominated by fed-up citizens endlessly encountering dangerous(?) chronic homeless people on the streets. Responding to the concerns of their citizens,...

Here is a brief story about social medicine in the city of Toronto. It is an interview with Dr. Andrew Boozary, who heads the social medicine program at the...

A magical mystery tour is currently being considered by a few American jurisdictions. What percentage of the people experiencing chronic homelessnessChronic homelessness means homelessness lasting for a long time...

Reviewer Judy Stone, an infectious disease specialist, uses a periscope of chronic homelessness to capture a view of a growing housing crisis in America. Stone focuses first upon a...

In Australia, how many well-being influences can be gathered up and sheltered under the immeasurably well-intentioned umbrella of a 'Human Right?' Indeed, is 'well-intentioned' a sufficient reason to define...

Researchers in England have done a massive review of evidence about health and social care for people who are homeless. The justification for the review itself comes from evidence:...

Since starting affordablehousingaction.org, we've been watching and reporting on the relationship between housing and health. We're aware that in the 1980's, when health research began noticing that additional $$...

Earlier this year, affordablehousingaction.org wrote about an employment program in Harris County, Texas. Employ2Empower offered employment to people who were homeless. In the pilot phase of the program, one...

Yesterday . . . a determination that lower class housing might confidently be labelled an eyesore. Meanwhile, those who occupied that housing might be viewed to be of little...

The UK government is at work revamping its mental health strategy. Organizations are offering up studies and advice. There are calls to strengthen the connection between mental health care...

"Social housing tenants need reassurance on decarbonising homes." That's a headline that is revisited below in this post. These days, it's also the punch line, as in ". . ....

Supportive housing is supposed to be part of the solution to homelessness, not contributing to it. It's supposed to be the magic space where people who have been homeless...

Canada and the United States need more supportive housing, the kind that is affordable for people with very low incomes and provides support to help with activities of daily...

At the beginning of the year, we published a post about the surprising prevalence of brain injuries among the homeless, based on research by Tiffany O'Connor at the Hamilton...

Those dratted American public housing tenants who won't drink the Kool-Aid! With the Race-To-Replace currently under starter's orders, big bucks and bulldozers poised and ready, who are these selfish...

Nursing homes have no desire to become custodians of tatty old furniture, near and dear to nobody's hearts but the owner's. But far from discouraging such an intake along...

The 'ahead of its time' horrors of George Orwell's book, 1984, has in some respects taken 40 years and more to catch up to the events predicted in its...

In housing and homelessness circles, California is well known for its high housing costs and its tens of thousands of people who are living 'unsheltered.' California's Project Homekey is an...

When one of the world's well known newspapers does an 'exclusive analysis' and concludes deaths among the homeless are surging, it's worth taking note. Studies that link early mortality and...

City Hope St. Louis provides homeless shelter and resources in St. Louis, Missouri. Like many organizations that operate shelters for people who are homeless, their hand-to-mouth income flow requires...

It may be hard to view closing an emergency shelter as a step forward for providing services to the homeless in the Kitchener-Waterloo region of Ontario. But the House of...

Three people who are homeless are sitting on a park bench, content with sharing the little they have — tipsy conversation, laughter and a bottle of cheap wine. One...

Free Market Housing Assistance? Known by a variety of terms around the world (e.g. housing allowance, rent supplement, housing choice, Section 8 vouchers) that bridge the gap between an...

What makes a human being healthy, with a long life expectancy? There are as many answers as there are proponents of important influences. Modern medicine (including vaccination) has the...

One in three New Zealand councils are looking to pry elusive rent subsidies dollars from the federal government in order to build social housing. The demand for social (or...

Here are two studies from the U.S. that discuss the merits of permanent supported housing for people who have prolonged experience of homelessnessBoth reports came to our attention via...

Our first thought was that linking financial woes to homelessness was a celebration of the obvious. The second thought, however, was that a large number of non-veterans in different...

One third of the households on the waiting list at the Housing Authority of New Haven live outside New Haven's boundaries. The Housing Authority is only allowed to build...

Hospitals in the United States were partners in housing developments before the pandemic. As we reported in a post in 2017, Dignity Health in Sacramento, California found that investing...

Yes, there are people who wonder whether home ownership is all it's cracked up to be. This intriguing point of view diverges substantially from the idea that everyone should...

Here's a resource for people who want to extend the impact of health care services. It's a booklet that outlines best practices that have combined goals of providing housing...

Australia already appears to be suffering from the dramatic and devastating effects of climate change while being led, like America, by a government that refuses to see any sign...

Great? We wish we could mean 'great' in some kind of 'light at the end of the tunnel' way. But we can't. Instead we're talking about a comprehensive article...

Health researchers Diana Hernandez and Carolyn Swope from Columbia University have recently published two important articles that connect housing with health. We have much more access to information about health...

Resilience is a measure of how well a crisis, calamity, or catastrophe can be withstood. As the term is used in this blog, it comes in two flavours. Community resilience...

Quirky Architectural Think-Toy For an affordable housing solution? Or barely habitable concentration camp cage for homeless children? It would seem that shipping container housing can be both. Just as a pile...

Health insurers in the United States are investing to reduce direct health care costs, which affect their bottom line and profit levels. Some of those investments help make housing...

The Guardian has just published a story about Finland’s remarkable success in lowering the number of people who are homeless in the capital Helsinki. We’ve covered stories about Finland’s success...

Remember 911? That was the number you were meant to dial in an emergency if you wished to summon the police? These days, you need to be careful what...

Affordable housing is not just a collection of construction material and land costs. It's a purse that must stretch to cover a rental or purchase . . . after...

This article was first published in March 2018 and is updated with new information released on January 24 and March 8, 2019. Poor housing conditions in Canada's northern territory of...

In our media scans, we see calls for more affordable housing daily. As new groups of people with affordability issues come to light (firefighters, health workers and teachers, for...

The NHP Foundation, an affordable housing provider in the US, is challenging others to reboot and accept homeless people as tenants. NHP argues that with appropriate supports and partnerships,...

Housing First, a widely promoted approach to ending homelessness, is based on the idea that people who are homeless cannot properly focus on sorting out their often complex lives...

Here's a story from McKnight's Senior Living about the health benefits of affordable housing with supports for elderly people. McKnight's Senior Living is an online publication out of the United...

In England, if you rent your home in the private market, your landlord can evict you at any time for no reason, just 'because'. With land prices soaring, more...

Intersectionality. Affordability. Big words to do battle with homelessness. But from the bottom of the deepest trenches in that battle, the individuals involved are aware of the very real...

Mental health workers in Idaho are appealing for help to increase the amount of affordable housing in that state. According to the United Way's ALICE report*, Idaho needs thousands...

A pregnant mom arrives at The Washington D.C. perinatal clinic Mamatoto Village. Is she homeless, or facing eviction, or couch-surfing? These are all important health questions. And if her housing...

Homelessness is recognized as a growing problem in many nations. Street counts are popular just now, but just how many homeless people are dieing? Surely that's a measure that...

Only 10% of people’s health needs are delivered at a medical facility. The recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation: Beyond Health Care: The Role of Social Determinants in Promoting...

Homelessness is a disease in Canadian indigenous communities that afflicts many. It brings with it a host of mental and physical complications, such as alcoholism and severe depression. Many northern...

A story from a local Massachusetts paper illustrates the uphill battle against a long held government mindset: the best projects to fund are seed-money projects: those that grow wings...

There has long been a reluctance to recognize housing as an important social determinant of health. Accepting the idea means facing the challenge of finding affordable housing for those...

Oops! Some of the best intentions don't pan out quite the expected way. Some twenty plus Cuyahoga County, Ohio communities have instituted what, on the surface, seemed to be a...

A new British report by the NAO (National Audit Office) suggests that prisons now drive 90 per cent of inmates mad, or turns them into drug addicts, or both....

In United States, where private enterprise holds sway in the healthcare system, it might be expected that a for-profit hospital would shy away from treating homelessness as a healthcare...

Not all health care professionals feel that health care dollars should flow to the huge and hugely expensive medical industry which gives them their livelihood. In Canada, the British Columbia Nurses...

"Affordable and stable housing plays a critical role in supporting the health and wellbeing of children." This is the conclusion reached by a recent report by the American National Housing...