The health of individuals and the health of communities are linked in so many ways, from zoning to access to fresh food, safe housing, safe streets and parks, and proper medical care. How is this growing realization affecting practice for both community development organizations and health care organizations? What does it take for these two separate worlds to partner toward shared goals? Thanks to the 
What Happens When a CDC Pivots to a Health-First Focus?
Old Brooklyn Community Development Corporation in Cleveland finds that being an early adopter of a community health focus has its advantages.
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 […]
Getting the Lead Out: Controlling Lead Paint Hazards in Housing
Lead poisoning remains the foremost environmental health risk to American children, with just under one million children with elevated lead levels. While the average...
How the Community Reinvestment Act Can Help Flint
The audacious and callous decisions leading to the tragedy in Flint, Michigan are cruel and beyond comprehension. What is needed is an all-out effort...
Can San Francisco Get Mixed-Income Public Housing Redevelopment Right?
The HOPE SF program is aiming to explicitly avoid many of the problems mixed-income public housing redevelopments have faced, to create a truly inclusive process.
Staying Ahead of the Age Wave
Groups working with older adults, including many community developers, are crafting a range of creative interventions, from home modifications to service-enriched housing models, to allow seniors to age in place. Will it be enough?
Smaller Cities Are Laboratories for Change
In smaller cities it is typically much easier to engage high levels of leadership, get traction for strategies that are more visible, engage the wider community, build trust, and scale solutions more quickly than in larger areas. Here are a few examples.
Flint: Tainted Choices, Tainted Water
Like the water itself, the situation in Flint, Mich., should be crystal clear: elected and appointed officials, at the state and federal levels, have done...
Sitting on a Porch Can Be Good for Your Health
To help combat isolation and reweave the connecting fabric that had been lost, a neighborhood arts center launches an initiative that eventually became a movement.
The Next Step in Supportive Housing
With the passage of the Affordable Care Act, individual-focused healthy lifestyles—regardless of socioeconomic status—became an increased topic of discussion. Along with clear correlations between...
Green Is Affordable
The affordable housing movement has not only accepted green building, but is making it integral to its work.
The Tenacity of Dysfunction
The word resilience has different meanings in different fields. In the field of material science, it refers to the ability of a material to...
How *to* Connect Health and Community Development
A recent Rooflines post explored how not to connect community development and health, urging practitioners to not fall into the trap of “moralizing public...
Is a Home with Lead Hazards Really “Affordable”?
The cost of housing is not simply the mortgage, rent, and utilities, but the individual and community health, education, and social costs associated with low-quality, unstable, and unhealthy housing.
California’s New Environmental Movement
How communities of color, using health and jobs as rallying cries, took on Big Oil -- and won!
Health and the Spaces Inbetween
Last year, we published a focus issue on health and community development. We called the package “Are Our Neighborhoods...
Prescription for a Legal Advocate
When we wrote in 2006 about Boston Medical Center's program to link patients to lawyers who could help improve their...
Don’t Dump on Us
If it were not acceptable for anyone to suffer from substandard housing or the problems of disinvested neighborhoods, then many of the public health issues facing us would be automatically reduced.
Community Development and New Understandings of Health and Wellness
In June 2012, I attended the Institute for the Future’s Health Horizons conference Innovating Information Ecosystems: The Next Decade and Beyond as an expert...
Breathing Easier
A Massachusetts-based program provides home environment assessments, education, and home remediation services—often resulting in the improved health and lives of families.
Keeping Seniors Healthy by Fostering Connections and Community
For high needs seniors with chronic illnesses, health is not merely—or even mostly—a matter for medical professionals.
Q: Can Supporting Community Development Improve Outcomes for the Health Sector?
Yes! Over 50 percent of premature deaths in the U.S. can be attributed to preventable non-medical factors, specifically behavioral, environmental, and social conditions.
Aligning Health Systems With Community Development
Hospitals and health systems can’t solve societal challenges alone. But they can play a key role in mobilizing and aligning joint resources to bring positive changes to low-income communities.
Community Building Despite Trauma
The trauma caused by poverty and the systems that reinforce it can short-circuit standard efforts to build community. A new method called “trauma-informed community building” aims to change that.
Bridging Divides with Peer-to-Peer Strategies in Public Housing
Peer-to-peer strategies in public housing can keep residents engaged in programs offered within their respective communities by addressing cultural divides, trust issues, and employment barriers.
Developing Economic, Along with Physical, Health
Sue Joss and Jason Barbosa might seem to be unlikely economic development partners. She is the veteran CEO of a major nonprofit health care...
Leaving Grandma Out in the Cold
The demise of the federal program that funded senior housing construction bodes ill for the increasing numbers of low-income seniors who struggle to afford a decent place to live.
Webinar: Are Our Neighborhoods Making Us Sick?
Inadequate housing conditions—the presence of lead, radon, water leaks, poor ventilation, pollution or mold—are linked to poor health. But research also shows that even...
Healthy Foods, Strong Communities
Fresh fruits and veggies are good for more than just your health.
Where Were All the Sidewalks Built?
A health and community development partnership leads to a revelation for a city transportation department.
Fall 2018 — Health and Community Development Supplement
In our third supplement, we focus on a coalition's work to lower the number of asthma-related hospital visits from an apartment complex, and how sitting on a porch can be good for your health. Click on the photo to download a copy.
Interview with Mark D. Constantine, president and CEO of Richmond Memorial Health Foundation
Mark Constantine gives us a view of one foundation’s attempt to learn to walk the walk and how that commitment can influence the work one organization does to create a culture of health in its community.
Are Planners Responsible for Public Health?
Could planners have an effect on waistlines around the Beltway? Maryland’s Prince George’s County and Virginia’s Fairfax County are examining how land use and...
Cooking With Health, and Heritage, in Mind
A recent article in The New York Times discussed an initiative to bring fresh, healthy food to a low-income Bronx neighborhood in New York’s...
A Bad Mix: Utility Shut-Offs and Chronic Illnesses
In most states, a household can avoid or delay termination of its utility service due to overdue balances if the shut-off would significantly impact their health. But the process isn’t as simple as it may seem
Shelter Shorts—The Week in Community Development, April 27
Climate Gentrification | A Marijuana Tax for Housing? | Homeownership Alone Can't Close the Wealth Gap | Illegal ICE Raids on Farms | Keeping An Eye on Opportunity Zones | More...
Financial Metrics Won’t Tell the Full Picture
Cost savings alone do not measure the full value of the collaboration between the health care and housing sectors.
Urban Institute Report Highlights Health and Housing Links
There have been many studies, reports, and articles throughout the years that highlight the correlation between a person's housing...
How a Risk-Averse Hospital and a Risk-Taking CDC Built a Functional Partnership
Shelterforce recently spoke with Angela Mingo of Nationwide Children’s Hospital and the Rev. John Edgar of Community Development for All People to learn more about their health/housing partnership and how it came to be.
In Schools, Eliminating Poverty Stigma Could End Child Hunger
More Americans live in high-poverty neighborhoods than ever before, according to a recent Century Foundation report, and many of...
A Look at a Medical, Legal Aid Partnership in New Orleans
A health center has partnered with a legal services agency to better help patients by addressing the social determinants of health. This “medical-legal partnership” is part of a growing trend that’s taking place across the nation.
What Responsibilities Do Institutions Have In Their Communities?
Universities need to take an active interest in maintaining and enhancing community stability.
Why Food-Oriented Development Is Easier to Implement
You’ve heard of transit-oriented development. But food-oriented development might be easier to generate.
A Marketplace for Health and Housing to Exchange Money—Has the Time Come?
Why would there be a need for a marketplace that values health? The answer is simple: our current “investments” in health are not working.
Our Financial Reform, Our Health
The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future, by Joseph Stiglitz, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., June 2012. 448 pp. $27.95 (Hardcover). Available on Amazon.
Organizing for Hospital Community Benefits
Community development corporations need to become more educated about hospital community benefits. This is what can be done to get the process started.
Shelter Shorts, The Week in Community Development—Sept. 21
News from—and affecting—the community development world.
Loneliness Kills; Community Developers Can Help
Some social determinants of health are concrete and physical. A substandard house with mold and pests, for example, will lead to more asthma and...
Shelter Shorts, The Week in Community Development—Oct. 12
News from—and affecting—the community development world. This week: fast food swamps, Seattle has too many apartments, criminal justice, basic income pilot, more.
Reshaping Housing Policy with a Health Lens
In Georgia, public health practitioners used a Health Impact Assessment to suggest changes to the allocation plan for Low-Income Housing Tax Credits. This is how they made it happen.
Tools of the Trade: Measuring the Health-Related Returns of Community Development
Partnerships are becoming more the norm and less the exception, but how do we know that they are actually having a good effect on health, well-being, and economic opportunity?
Transforming Vacant Land Into Community Assets
Vacant land activities can be low cost and high impact; the price of failure is not steep, but the return on investment can be high.
How This Museum Supports Community Integration and Trauma Recovery
Using artistic expression to de-stigmatize and treat trauma.
Forget Red and Blue States: Go Green for Better Jobs, Health, and Environment
The following op-ed is an expanded version of “Green States Better for Jobs,” that appeared in the Louisville Courier Journal on October 20, 2014. How do you win an election in any red Southern state? If you are running as a senator the conventional wisdom is you condemn government as an enemy of working families […]
Look Outside the Box with Health and Housing Partnerships
Though it seems the connection between health and community development is on everyone’s lips these days, the two sectors are really still at the beginning stages of learning how to work together.
The Affordable Care Act: Implications for Community Development
Even if you have not tuned out of the long-running debate about the future of health care in the United States, you can be...
The Other Health Agenda
While health-care reform has once again grabbed the headlines and the attention of health advocates in the 2008 presidential election, the next occupant of...
Making the Connections Between Housing and Health
In December, President Barack Obama signed into law the Senator Paul Simon Water for the World Act that offers health, and dignity to millions of people through access to life-saving water and sanitation. The focus of this legislation will not cost taxpayers a penny more; it simply makes U.S. investment in existing programs smarter, more […]
Rx for Tenants
Doctors and lawyers team up to help tenants stuck in housing that's bad for their health
Better Together
The community development and health sectors can and should work together to reduce health disparities and improve everyone’s health.
Foreclosing on Our Health?
In a dangerous cycle, medical bills are a common cause of foreclosure—and the stress and financial crisis of foreclosure causes an increase in serious health problems.
When Domestic Violence and Utility Bill Debt Intersect
In Pennsylvania, domestic violence survivors are often not afforded the protections they are entitled to because many people are often unaware of the Responsible Utility Customer Protection Act and its provisions. A three-year pilot program aimed to change that.
How Organizing for Justice Helps Your Mental Health
How do social justice, organizing, and mental health interact? Shelterforce chats with clinical social worker Dawn Belkin Martinez to find out.
Advocates for Healthy Housing
As public health and housing activists recognized a century ago when they fought for stronger sanitation and health codes, poorly maintained housing causes serious...
Creating a Sanctuary For Youth in Camden, New Jersey
At Hopeworks ‘N Camden, youth have often experienced a lifetime of traumatic events and toxic stress. Learning from the health world’s understanding of trauma can create better outcomes for service organizations—and better workplaces too.
Moving Hospital and Health System Investments Upstream
Across the country, nonprofit hospitals are under intense scrutiny due to the discrepancy between the substantial revenues they generate compared to the level of...
Common Sense Is Community Development’s Most Powerful Ally
The title of this post proved itself to be true for us in Duluth, when local organizations got together to address the growing need...
Why Health and Housing Partnerships Are Hard
Housing managers and health providers are natural partners for health care programming, but misunderstandings and institutional mismatches can get in the way.
Seven Tips to Help You Forge Health and Housing Partnerships
About 80 percent of a person’s health status can be attributed to non-medical factors such as housing and income.
How a Health Impact Assessment Helped House Irish Travellers
An HIA that focused on Irish Traveller housing programs proves successful because it empowered the population.
Foreclosures Are Making People Sick
[Editor's note: Shelterforce continues to discuss the connection between health and housing, and most recently devoted an entire issue to the topic. The op-ed below originally appeared in American Banker on November 3, 2014.] While foreclosure activity has declined since the peak of the mortgage crisis, millions of families are still at risk of losing […]
Using Art to Create Community at a Clinic
Arts projects at a Minneapolis clinic created a natural connection between people who might not otherwise interact.
A Farm-to-Fork Movement, Starting with the Corner Store
One of the more intriguing aspects of the local food movement in the United States is the effort to...
The Mission: End Childhood Lead Poisoning in Rochester
In the 1990s, Rochester, New York, had an alarmingly large number of children who had elevated lead levels in their blood. Decades later, the rate has decreased by 85 percent. This is how a local coalition made it happen.
California’s Endless Housing “Crisis”
In many ways, the recognition of the current “crisis” stems from middle- and upper-income Californians finally being impacted, and using their power to push for solutions that would address their situation. But their solutions ignore another population.
New Financing for Community Health Centers
The Whittier Street Health Center, a 78-year-old clinic serving Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, rang in the new year by relocating to a new six-story, 78,900...
Prescription for a New Neighborhood
Housing mobility can complement community revitalization for children with serious health challenges.
Not Just Partners, But Neighbors: Health Care in Affordable Housing Developments
Offering on-site health care in housing developments makes sense. But developing and managing housing and health care facilities can be very different. How do you make them work together?
Hubs Help Move the Local Food Movement to the Next Level
It’s not unusual to read a press release from a governor’s or mayor’s office celebrating a deal to bring a new company to a neighborhood or city. Typically we’d be talking about a new manufacturing or tech firm, and the press release would speak glowingly of the prospects for economic development. Which makes a bit […]
Housing Is Health: Ballot Initiatives in California Approved
A conversation with three county supervisors who were instrumental in moving affordable housing ballot measures forward in the California Bay Area by bringing in the health factor.
To Save On Medi-Cal Costs, a Bid to Help Homeless Patients With Rent Money
California lawmakers consider devoting an additional $90 million to subsidize rent for homeless patients.
Approaching Partnerships Between Health Care Institutions and Community Development Organizations
There isn’t an exact science to forming partnerships. The slow and sometimes messy process requires patience, allies, and trust.
Health and Community Development Resources
If you want to explore the intersection of health and
community development further, here are some places to start.
Author Roundtable
Shelterforce authors discuss the roles of place, mobility, and displacement on health and neighborhoods.
The Real Limits of Imaginary Lines
We can’t truly understand how a person’s health is affected by where they live if we look only at data within arbitrary boundaries like census tracts and ignore the places people actually go and don’t go every day.
Why Do We Care About Health Equity?
The fight for health equity—for everyone to have a roughly equal shot at the potential and choice that good health offers—is of course, similar to the fight for economic justice and the work of community development.
Under One Roof: Health Care and Social Services in the Same Place
Without steady employment, Olivia and her son found themselves without housing, without food, without healthcare, and without options. It...
Greening Vacant Lots: Low Cost, Big Effect in Philly
A Philadelphia program is cleaning up abandoned lots, helping formerly incarcerated residents get jobs, and improving the overall health and well-being of neighborhoods.
Getting Health on Board
It’s becoming increasingly common for community development corporations and grassroots housing organizations to have board members from the health care sector. Here's why.
Shelter Shorts—The Week in Community Development, April 20
NIMBYs, YIMBYs, PHIMBYs-Oh My! | Can Algorithms Make Equitable Cities? | Retail Segregation Takes a Toll | E.R. Visits and "Tough" Neighborhoods | Enough Innovation Already | More...
Condemning Asthma, Not Homes in North Carolina
An apartment complex in North Carolina generated 120 times as many hospital visits as would have been expected for its population, until a creative coalition forced its sale and worked with the new owner to change things.
Renovating Senior Complexes to Be Green, Healthy, and Connected
Orness Plaza is one of the only public housing developments geared toward seniors and the disabled in Mankato, Minn., the state’s fourth largest city....
Health Care Confronts Challenge to Shift from “Volume to Value”
Health care, as we all know, is a big business. U.S. hospitals alone have $782 billion in total annual expenditures, which is roughly five...
How *Not* to Connect Health and Community Development
A few months ago as I walked to a board meeting of my local CDFI, I passed a memorial to a young man who...
A New Responsibility for Children’s Hospitals: The Health of Neighborhoods
Children’s hospitals in Ohio are making key investments to address a major cause of poor health — substandard housing.
Housing Advocates Track Indoor Environmental Hazards to Spur Improvements
When the community health promoters of San Diego’s Environmental Health Coalition (EHC) say they’re doing pollution testing, many people probably imagine samples from the...
Community Development: It’s What’s For Dinner
Last week we heard from Alan Mallach and Mindy Thompson Fullilove on different aspects of stable neighborhoods.
Mallach, in his post, looks at some of...
The Intersection of Health Philanthropy and Housing
Health philanthropy and community development have historically worked on separate tracks. That’s changing.
Walking Warriors
When it comes to neighborhood-based health activity interventions, how they are carried out is often as important as what is offered.
When Supportive Housing Isn’t
The rationale behind supportive housing for people with mental disabilities is that pairing individualized services with permanent housing will help them live independently. But one San Francisco advocate sees more neglect than support.