Posted in News
In 2003 in Coal Run, a small hollow in southeastern Ohio, 89-year-old Helen McCuen still paid a ”water man” to fill a cistern buried in her front yard twice a month. Turning on a tap and getting fresh water wasn’t an option. McCuen lived in a largely African American part of town that lacked running water. The nearby city told residents it was too expensive to extend water lines to them. Meanwhile, a few miles away in a white neighborhood, water flowed freely. “The water stopped where the black folks started,” one local resident told the New York Times. It turned out that federal funds were used to extend water lines up to Coal Run but not to the African American community. A lawsuit would eventually force the city to lay water lines to the black residents.
Read MorePosted in Expert Insights
The city of Richmond, Virginia has some of the most concentrated poverty in the country. Richmond has high unemployment and poverty rates of 40 percent or above in its East End neighborhoods, which includes Church Hill North and has a majority African American racial makeup (92 percent). In the East End, life expectancy rates are lower than in the City as a whole, and in fact in some of these neighborhoods, residents can expect to live 10 to 15 years less than people in other areas of Richmond. Additionally, the East End is said to have the largest concentration of public housing between Washington DC and Atlanta, and only a small percent of residents are homeowners.
Read MorePosted in Expert Insights
Ashland, CA, is a community in unincorporated Alameda County struggling from decades of disinvestment, high unemployment, and amongst the worst health indicators in the county. The numbers of reentry residents is amongst the highest in the county, further impacting the area’s stability and needs. Despite all this, the community has strong bones to build on.
Read MorePosted in Featured (Stories)
Research is documenting the harmful effects on children when families must keep moving to find a safe, affordable home.
Read MorePosted in Expert Insights
This article appears in the Winter 2018 edition of Shelterforce magazine.
Read MorePosted in Expert Insights
This article originally appeared on America’s Essential Hospitals’ Essential Insights blog on 12/4/17.
Read MorePosted in Community Close Ups
Hospital Partners with Housing Authority to Put Health at the Center of a Neighborhood Transformation In the early 2000s, Stamford Hospital began planning a major expansion. Located in Stamford, Connecticut’s West Side neighborhood, the 305-bed regional hospital envisioned a large new state-of-the-art addition to its facility. The hospital owned various pieces of real estate in the nearby neighborhood, but none were contiguous with its existing campus. Meanwhile, Charter Oak Communities (COC), a public-private entity that evolved out of the Stamford Housing Authority, was exploring ways to replace its outdated public housing complexes on the West Side.
Read MorePosted in Community Close Ups
Trauma-Informed Community Building Sets Stage for Neighborhood Revitalization Susan Neufeld, Vice President of Resident Programs and Services for BRIDGE Housing Corporation (BRIDGE), describes the existing 606-unit Potrero Terrace and Annex housing projects as “an island of poverty in a sea of wealth.” Unlike many distressed public housing complexes that are surrounded by other disadvantaged neighborhoods, residents of Potrero Terrace and Annex, with a median annual income of $14,000, are surrounded by Potrero Hill neighbors making ten times that much.
Read MorePosted in Community Close Ups
Tipping Point: Deep, Neighborhood-Scale Transformation Creates Lasting Change Of the East Lake Meadows public housing project before revitalization, says Carol Naughton of Purpose Built Communities, “the only thing that was working was the drug trade.” Frequently called “Little Vietnam” – as in, a war zone — the Atlanta neighborhood grappled with extreme poverty, violent crime, abysmal educational outcomes and high unemployment. The poorly built, 40-year-old public housing was in severe disrepair. For kids, East Lake Meadows functioned mostly as a pipeline into the Georgia penal system.
Read MorePosted in Community Close Ups
Weaving Together Opportunities for Healthier Lives for a Diverse Immigrant Community “Wherever there is conflict in the world, a few years later you start to see that population showing up here,” says Andriana Abariotes, executive director of Twin Cities LISC (Local Initiatives Support Corporation). Minneapolis-St. Paul has a long history of welcoming immigrants and refugees from around the world and is home to many organizations serving these populations. St. Paul’s East Side, where LISC has worked for years, is home to a rich cultural mix of immigrants including Hmong, Somali, Karin, Bhutanese, Sudanese, Latinos and others, alongside Native and African Americans.
Read MorePosted in Community Close Ups
Community Development 2.0—Collective Impact Focuses a Neighborhood Strategy for Health Not all community developers are aware that the work they’re doing has the potential to improve health, but the East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation (EBALDC) has built health into its strategic plan, and in the neighborhood revitalization work of the San Pablo Area Revitalization Collaborative (SPARC), convened by EBALDC, health is the first priority. The San Pablo Avenue Corridor neighborhood that stretches between downtown Oakland and nearby Emeryville is one of the poorest and most disadvantaged areas of Oakland, California. Here, life expectancy is up to 20 years lower than just a few miles away in the Oakland Hills.
Read MorePosted in Community Close Ups
Holistic Redevelopment to Bring Lasting Change to a Distressed Neighborhood The St. Bernard Public Housing Development was already in severe disrepair and only 75 percent occupied on August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit leaving much of the Bayou District neighborhood submerged in eight feet of water. One of four large public housing complexes in New Orleans, the St. Bernard was notorious for its blighted properties, rampant violence, drug activity, and severe poverty. Schools in the area were among the worst in New Orleans, a state whose schools regularly rank as low as 48th in the nation. Katrina rendered the housing complex uninhabitable, and many of the residents scattered as part of the Katrina diaspora.
Read MorePosted in Expert Insights
This article first appeared on the Urban Institute’s UrbanWire blog on July 20, 2017.
Read MorePosted in Expert Insights
In May, the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) and New York State Homes and Community Renewal (HCR) launched a new Integrated Physical Needs Assessment tool to provide affordable housing owners with a comprehensive protocol to assess the range of options available to upgrade their buildings. The tool will allow owners to take advantage of incentives and opportunities to make their properties as sustainable and safe as possible. A key component of the Integrated Physical Needs Assessment is a new health overlay, providing guidance on health-focused upgrades as well as operations and maintenance protocol.
Read MorePosted in Crosswalk
As America ages, housing and community development allies work together to develop new choices for seniors. With creative models of long-term care and assisted living continuing to crop up, innovative aging-in-place programs offer an important alternative for many. The variety of options ensures that seniors with different levels of capability and dependence can live safely where they wish.
Read MorePosted in Expert Insights
This blog reports back from the Housing + Health summit, mentioned in a recent Healthy Community Initiatives blog featuring the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
Read MorePosted in Expert Insights
A hundred years ago at the height of the tuberculosis epidemic, New York City’s planners and public health establishment mobilized to develop what the New York Times called “…the largest and finest hospital ever built” for tuberculosis. Operating in the absence of any known cure for the disease, the Sea View Tuberculosis Hospital’s medical facilities were, in a real sense, speculative and aspirational. Tuberculosis (TB) had topped the list of causes of death in New York City for decades, and the call to action was urgent.
Read MorePosted in News
Daniel Lau, Manager of Strategic Engagement
Read MorePosted in Expert Insights
On a Friday afternoon, a 3-year-old girl sat quietly in my clinic with her parents. She wore a beautiful, dimpled smile and sported a purple dress with ruffles, her dark, curly hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. I opened a book and asked her about the pictures. She turned the pages with me, smiling, but said nothing. Her parents expressed concern that she still didn’t speak. They later shared with me that they were sleeping on the floor of a friend’s house, unable to find a place they could afford.
Read MorePosted in Expert Insights
Read the full Expert Insight series!
Read MorePosted in Expert Insights
Sometimes solving persistent problems requires a strange set of bedfellows. A collaborative of nine affordable housing organizations in Portland, Oregon has been proving that introducing
Read MorePosted in Featured (Resources)
This press release first appeared on the Enterprise website February 25, 2016.
Read MorePosted in Publications
Last summer, we introduced our magazine of stories illustrating the deep connections between neighborhood and health. Our first piece brought readers to two housing developments in Arizona designed for (and with) grandparents raising grandchildren.
Read MorePosted in Featured (Resources)
Fact: Since 2011, the federal Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI) has leveraged over $140 million in grants and an estimated $1 billion in additional financing for grocery stores, farmers’ markets, and other healthy food enterprises in low-income food deserts.
Read MorePosted in Featured (Resources)
We know that Child Opportunity affects health and varies by zip code. So too a family’s opportunity, especially opportunity to access healthy affordable housing, with low risk of displacement due to gentrification, as explained in this Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) brief.
Read MorePosted in Publications
Welcome to The Pulse, the monthly newsletter of the Build Healthy Places Network. Each month we compile a short and sweet round-up of what smart people are talking about, researching, and doing to make neighborhoods and lives healthier. Click here to receive The Pulse in your inbox.
Read MorePosted in Publications
How do neighborhoods impact health?
Read MorePosted in Publications
Recently, Michael Rubinger, the head of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), one of the country’s largest investors in low-income neighborhoods, wrote that “poverty is a massive public health problem.” This is profound.
Read MorePosted in Featured (Resources)
We’re pleased to be kicking off a series of stories illustrating the deep connections between neighborhood and health. Over the next year, we’ll be visiting communities across the country who are doing innovative work at the intersection of health and community development and showcasing this workin Crosswalk, the network’s new publication on Medium.
Read MorePosted in Featured (Stories)
Welcome to The Pulse, the monthly newsletter of the Build Healthy Places Network. Each month we compile a short and sweet round-up of what smart people are talking about, researching, and doing to make neighborhoods and lives healthier. Click here to receive The Pulse in your inbox.
Read MorePosted in Expert Insights
Chester County, Pennsylvania, has been ranked one of the richest counties in the nation, yet 7 percent of its half-million residents live in poverty. Coatesville, a city of 13,000 people, is one such low-income pocket.
Read MorePosted in Featured (Stories)
For many seniors, the thought of a nursing home is frightening—and dreaded. Assisted living communities can offer more autonomy, but often are out of reach financially because Medicare does not cover their services and Medicaid, the primary funder of long-term care, is limited in what it covers.
Read MorePosted in Publications
The Ohio Housing Finance Agency (OHFA) has long recognized that housing is a powerful social determinant of health. Considerations of health and housing begin at the annual planning level, when research-based housing priorities are set, public-private partnerships are considered, and input from stakeholders forms the plan’s final draft.
Read MorePosted in Publications
Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies Blog (2/25/15) Not All Hard-Hit Neighborhoods Recover Equally Foreclosures disproportionately hit minority neighborhoods across the U.S. during the housing crisis. In Boston, over 80 percent of foreclosures took place in just five of its 15 planning districts—Dorchester, East Boston, Hyde Park, Mattapan, and Roxbury; nearly 75 percent of the residents in these five districts are non-white, while the remainder of Boston is 70 percent white.
Read MorePosted in Featured (Stories)
Does the Earned Income Tax Credit Improve Health?
Read MorePosted in Publications
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”:
Read MorePosted in Publications
Princeton, N.J.—The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) today announced the 15 communities that have been chosen as finalists for the third annual RWJF Culture of Health Prize, which honors inspiring communities that place a high priority on health and bring diverse partners together to achieve local change. Our Managing Director, Colby Dailey, serves on the Review Committee.
Read More