Housing and health: a time for action

Abstract

The connection between housing—its quality, or security or affordability— and the health and wellbeing of people is well evidenced, but often underrepresented in the day-to-day governance of our cities and regions. The reasons for this underestimation are, to some extent, understandable, because the ways in which housing affects health are multiple, highly individualised, and interrelated. As the papers in this Special Issue show, despite international agreement on the fundamental requirement of shelter to enable people to have productive and healthy lives, housing is not a simple lever that can be pulled to improve or protect people’s health. This collection of papers captures an important time in the evolution of housing research, a time when the role of housing was as far from providing simple shelter, as it has ever been. Though the special issue was planned well before the pandemic, these papers were written largely from home offices in lockdown—from kitchen tables, and temporary desks in bedrooms and shared spaces. Regardless of the nation they were written in, this background context infuses the whole collection with a powerful new take on the role of housing in people’s lives and their health. Housing is portrayed as a protector, a key source of harm and risk, a powerful but invisible buffer, a place of stability, and a generator of health inequalities. As we reflect on this collection of papers in 2023, house prices, renter rights and household aspirations are gradually returning to their pre-pandemic trajectories. But arguably, the way people and governments regard housing has been changed forever—largely for the better. Dweik and Woodhall-Melnik’s (2022) systematic review, looks across a large literature to identify robust evidence on the impact of publicly subsidised housing on mental health. They find, despite the apparent ubiquity of social housing’s role in protecting tenants’ health, that there is a surprising sparsity of robust evidence of impact. Further, that what evidence there is, is shown to be highly dependent on the specifics of the housing programme, assistance measure, and neighbourhood being assessed. The authors note the pressing need, especially in the context of the economic uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, for policies that can improve the outcomes and experiences of economically marginalised populations, such as those housed in social and public housing. For this, new, directed work to provide rigorous evidence needs to occur. Gurney’s (2021), ‘Dangerous Liaisons’, uses a systematic literature mapping to provide us with a fresh consideration of the relationship between https://doi.org/10.1080/19491247.2023.2204650