Courtesy of the Community Advocates Public Policy Institute
Affordable, safe and stable housing is a basic building block for the health and well-being of people, families and communities. We spend two-thirds of our lives at “home,” which means our home and our health are deeply, directly and acutely linked. Because of this, our communities, our state and our country can and should commit to progress on housing.
Community Advocates Public Policy Institute recently released Home Is Where Our Health Is: Policies to Improve the Health of Renters in Milwaukee and Beyond, which examines three factors that affect both our homes and our health. We looked at the availability of affordable rental housing, the quality of rental housing and housing stability, and we came up with 32 policy recommendations to improve these factors.
Available affordable housing ensures that people can pay for housing and have enough left to cover basic needs. The median cost of a Milwaukee County rental home is $861 per month, and about one in three jobs doesn’t provide sufficient wages to pay that rent. In Milwaukee County, two out of three renter households with extremely low incomes pay more than 50% of their income toward their rent. When too much of a household budget is spent on housing, hunger can increase, nutrition can get ignored, health care is less consistent (fewer filled prescriptions, not keeping or delaying appointments, etc.), mental illness and stress increase, chronic illnesses worsen, hospitalizations increase, and lifespans shorten. We can and should increase incomes with common-sense bipartisan solutions and incentivize further affordable housing and workforce housing development.
We expect our homes to be healthy and nurturing places of respite, but not every home is. Critters want to live in our cozy homes, too, and homes are made of some hazardous materials. Allergies, chronic illnesses and injury can all result or be exacerbated by our homes. It would be reasonable for a renter to expect that a unit be inspected and licensed by an authority before occupying it, much like a car must meet rigorous safety standards before being sold. Unfortunately, current state law makes this too difficult for municipalities to do. We can, and we should, change that.
Stable housing means having a regular place to live and having control over if and when we move. Moving is stressful under the best circumstances, and having to move frequently or being evicted can throw lives and health into turmoil and is especially harmful to children’s well-being. Housing instability is acutely stressful for people and families. Moves can result in job loss and homelessness. We can, and we should, make housing more stable by increasing mediation services, helping tenants afford legal representation, expanding training for tenants and landlords and strengthening and better funding programs specifically for people experiencing homelessness or returning from incarceration.
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Our research unveiled a long history of both purposeful policy choices and inaction that have negatively impacted people’s health and housing. This history has been especially harmful for people of color and those with low incomes. We must insist on better policies that improve both housing and health and reduce long-standing racial and economic disparities.
Progress is already being made. Governor Tony Evers signed a bipartisan bill, worked on and passed by legislators, increasing emergency shelter funding and requiring the Wisconsin Department of Health Services to submit a waiver to the federal government to allow Medicaid dollars to pay for housing services. This kind of progress is encouraging. So much more can, and should, be done.
Mike Bare is research and program coordinator for Community Advocates Public Policy Institute and is the director of the Healthy Housing Initiative. To learn more about the Home Is Where Our Health Is report, go to ppi.communityadvocates.net/healthyhousing.html.
