June is National Healthy Homes Month, a time to bring awareness for the need for healthy homes across the country. But having a healthy home means more than making sure the home is free from hazards like lead paint or radon; it means making sure that a home is a place of safety and comfort and that the people in that home are connected to the community that surrounds them. This week, Romi Hall, NeighborWorks America’s new director of Healthy Homes & Communities, shared some insights into NeighborWorks and the intersection of health, affordable housing and comprehensive community development.
What does the phrase “healthy homes” mean to you?
Hall: To me, the phrase “healthy homes” means more than having a safe, well-constructed dwelling to live. Healthy homes need to be affordable. They need to be places of comfort and solace, as well as be thought of as a critical part of creating a healthy community.
Why is a healthy home so important? Hall: So much of our health and well-being is dependent on the places where we live, learn, work and play. Living in a healthy home is a key part of what makes us healthy. If we feel safe in our homes, our housing isn’t exacerbating health issues, we can live affordably, and we have local access to the key things that helps make our lives healthier (good schools, parks, jobs, grocery stores, etc.), health opportunity can be improved exponentially
Could you explain the role that communities play in healthy housing?
Hall: Our health is not just dependent on housing; it also is dependent on all the other interconnected factors that create good health. While housing is such a critical, foundational need, having other components in your community such as access to quality schools, childcare, jobs, grocery stores, parks, etc., are also key to optimal health and well-being. And it is also important that we take into account how important it is to have residents as partners in shaping the health of their home and community. When communities are not partners, we as practitioners miss out on the incredible knowledge that people have already amassed. Our work suffers as a result. We can’t then create healthier communities and homes.
What drew you to this work?
Hall: I was challenged early in my career to understand why some people had different health outcomes and opportunities than others. I heard too many of the same stories to think it was individual actions and circumstances. Then I learned about the social determinants of health, and it changed everything. As hard as the recent months have been during COVID-19 and the events triggered by the death of George Floyd, I am hopeful that as community developers we will take this moment as a call to center our work around addressing racial equity. These events have laid bare the inequities present in communities across the country and our need to work together to achieve what we want to see. NeighborWorks believes as I do: Every community is one of opportunity.
What are the biggest challenges to overcome in healthy housing?
Hall: COVID-19 and working to make sure everyone has a safe, healthy home to shelter in place. Housing is such a critical need in communities across America. This was certainly the case before COVID-19, and it is even more evident now.
Ready to ensure healthy homes and communities?
Following are some of Hall’s tips for organizations engaged in ensuring healthy housing and communities:
Following are some of Hall’s tips for organizations engaged in ensuring healthy housing and communities:
- Learn more about the connection between health, housing, and community development. It takes some time to wrap your head around understanding the intersection of these three. At first, in some ways, it seems counterintuitive. Often we think about our health in terms of our genetic code, when in fact our health is more related to our zip code and the places in which we live, learn, work, play and pray. Our work in housing and community development is about improving place for the people who live in the communities we care about — this is exactly what health is all about.
- Learn the language. Housing and community developers speak a different language than the health sector. NeighborWorks has a glossary to help. As you would learn to understand potential investors or funders, find out what health and health care cares about.
- Doing health work means more than partnering with health and health care partners; it means figuring out how residents and their voice are central to the work and considering how other sectors that influence health can be partners in your work. This might be running community planning work differently, rather than surveying people consider the use of arts and culture to invite new ideas on how to identify and solve community problems. This might also mean looking at new relationships with partners who are in education, recreation, and small business, to name a few. Find the people and the partners in your community who:
- Deeply care about the people and place where you work.
- Want to work with you to find out what residents want for their community.
- Are willing to leverage their organization or resources to figure out how to make community asks happen.
- There is no right or wrong way to implement a health strategy in your work. Consider the approaches identified in this SSIR article, where the East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation has identified four “housing plus” solutions in connecting housing, health and community.
- Preserving Culture
- Centering Community Power and Voice
- Collaborating Across Sectors
- Connecting Housing and Services
- I wish I better understood the role of capital, in all its forms, earlier in my career. I hadn’t realized until I came to community development how important the role of capital is in making communities healthier and ripe with opportunity. I really thought about my work in terms of securing grants or contracts, rather than thinking about how the system around community investment. Learning more about how the community investment system works opened up a whole new world of partnerships, opportunities, and resources that helped catalyze community results.
