Post From Publications
Share this post!
Colby Dailey, Managing Director of the Build Healthy Places Network, wrote a piece on the ShelterForce blog titled “Financial Incentives Encourage New Partnerships in Housing and Health”:
——
If you watch Downton Abbey, as I do, you know that Lord Grantham is becoming an affordable housing developer—much to his consternation. He’s been called on to help build a slate of new homes on a piece of his property in the wake of The Great War.
But it was his answer to a question asking why the need for quality housing that caught my ear last week. The country, he said, needs more high-quality housing because of the shockingly unfit condition of the recruits in WWI, summed up best in a post-war poster of the era: “you cannot expect to get an A1 population out of C3 homes.” Health and housing, it turns out, have been linked through history.
Fast-forward to last week’s Healthy Neighborhoods regional convening sponsored by the East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation in Oakland, CA, where the focus had expanded beyond housing to encompass healthy neighborhoods and the opportunity for new partnerships (and new funding streams) between community development, housing, and health care to improve the “upstream” social determinants of health. As most in the room would agree, treating illness without treating the root causes of poor health is costly on many levels.
To read the full blog post, click here.