Can Stable Housing Improve Your Health?

What if the state of a person's health had less to do with her income level and more with her housing conditions? A Canadian researcher suggests that the quality of housing and neighborhoods are a better indicator of health than money -- though usually, poor housing and low income levels go hand in hand.

The connection between ill health and poverty has often been documented on Change.org. Poverty in America blogger Greg Plotkin has written frequently about the connection between low incomes and high rates of obesity and documented the rural poor's access -- or lack thereof -- to health care. Health Care editor Josie Raymond wrote about the link between dangerous neighborhoods and higher incidences of breast cancer. Global Health blogger Michael Keizer has explained the effect of distributing income equitably over a given country's population: namely, an increased average health status.

But perhaps Kate Scott, a housing outreach coordinator in New Orleans, in a disturbing but powerful Poverty in America piece about a young girl's death from hundreds of rat bites, best gets at the heart of the matter: unsafe housing conditions are a leading cause of poor health in America.

According to Jim Dunn, Associate Professor at McMaster University in Canada and scientist at the Centre for Research on Inner City Health, "Your home is your only space where you are socially and in many ways legally sanctioned to have complete control and if you lack that, then that's going to be highly stressful." And long-term stress, as the National Institutes of Health explains, "can increase the risk of diseases like depression, heart disease and a variety of other problems." In short, if you want to stay healthy, avoid stressful situations.

Unfortunately, there are few things more nerve-wracking than a lack of stable, safe housing. Dunn cites a 1993 report that finds a significant correlation between "housing stressors" and "psychological distress." Being forced to live in shoddy housing "represents an independent and added source of stress to the lives of people of lower income," the report explains.

And stress is just the half of it. Dunn observes that when a family's limited financial resources are drained on housing expenses, there's not much money left to pay for food and other necessities. Even if low-income families want to purchase healthy food (which is usually more expensive than the cheap junk offered in the chips and soda aisle), living in poor neighborhoods makes it tough: an analysis of 54 studies found that people from economically disadvantaged communities "are less likely to have easy access to supermarkets carrying a wide variety of fresh produce and other healthy food." Extra money for stress-relieving, blood-pumping recreational activities is usually out of the picture.

Unaffordable housing, therefore, causes stress (and stress-induced illness) and makes relaxation difficult at best, impossible at worst.

But there's a light at the end of the tunnel. Dunn's ideas about the housing-health connection are particularly interesting because of their potential repercussions for our fight against poverty. We know that poverty leads to poor health. We also know that poor health, in turn, leads to poverty (researchers call this the "health-poverty trap"). Perhaps, Dunn theorizes, policymakers can actually fight poverty by simply helping the poor reach quality housing in good neighborhoods. Interventions in living conditions could quickly improve low-income people's health, helping them climb out of the "poverty trap" altogether.

Seems like Dunn's on to something. What do you think?

Photo credit: edenpictures