Shelter from the Storm: Roles, responsibilities, and challenges in United States housing policy governance

Abstract

Housing is a critical social determinant of health. Housing policy not only affects health by improving housing quality, affordability, and insecurity; housing policy affects health upstream through the politics that shape housing policy design, implementation, and management. These politics, or governance strategies, determine the successes or failures of housing policy programs. This paper is an overview of challenges in housing policy governance in the United States. I examine the important relationship between housing and health, and emphasize why studying housing policy governance matters. I then present three cases of housing governance challenges in the United States, from each pathway by which housing affects health - housing quality, affordability, and insecurity. Each case corresponds to an arm of the TAPIC framework for evaluating governance (Krieger and Higgins) [1], to assess mechanisms of housing governance in each case. While housing governance has come a long way over the past century, political decentralization and the expansion of the submerged state have increased the number of political actors and policy conflict in many areas. This creates inherent challenges for improving accountability, transparency, and policy capacity. In many instances, too, reduced government accountability and transparency increases the risk of harm to the public and lessens governmental integrity.

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“…Compared to people who owned a house with a mortgage, those who rented were at increased risk of fatal opioid overdose. This finding is consistent with other evidence of health disparities by housing tenure [45][46][47]. Injected drug use is more frequently reported among people living in unstable housing situations.…”

Brexit and trade policy: an analysis of the governance of UK trade policy and what it means for health and social justice

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BIM Dimensions and Application Areas for Enhancing Sustainability and Affordability of Affordable Housing: As a Key for Effective Housing Policies

“…These policies can affect countries' sustainable development. For example, housing policies can have impact on health, both downstream (e.g., affecting housing quality, affordability, and insecurity) and upstream (e.g., affecting housing policy design, implementation, and management) (Willison, 2017(Willison, :p.1113). There is a multiplier effect in the political economy of the effective sustainable AH policies on the sustainable development.…”

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