Housing and transportation
About
Housing is a basic human need. Housing includes houses, apartments, and congregate housing like nursing homes or halfway houses. Transportation connects us to the places where we live, work, learn and play. Transportation systems can include buses, subways, trains as well as sidewalks, streets, bike paths, highways and air travel.
Relationship to health and equity
Safe, high-quality housing is the foundation for our individual and collective physical and mental health. The condition of housing affects our health, as does its stability and affordability. When housing is free from toxins such as mold and lead paint, we have better health. When it is affordable, we have more resources to pay for medical care, healthy food and utility bills. A lack of affordable housing is a leading cause of homelessness, and people of color and veterans experience homelessness disproportionately.
The types of transportation options that we have impact our health. Public transportation and active travel (e.g., walking, biking) can increase physical activity, reduce traffic-related injuries and deaths, and improve the quality of our environment, all of which can improve health. Many of us depend on driving because of planning decisions that prioritize car travel over active travel like widening roads instead of expanding public transit. Auto transport, while sometimes more convenient, leads to traffic injury and death, air pollution and physical inactivity.
Housing and transportation impact our ability to get a job, education, medical care, food and more. Policies and practices that have led to residential segregation and disinvestment in public transportation, pedestrian safety infrastructure, grocery stores, and safe spaces to exercise widens health disparities. Everyone deserves access to stable, high quality, affordable housing and reliable, safe transportation. Investments in housing and transportation benefit everyone.
Relationship to systems and structures
Decisions made by elected officials and business leaders have created an environment where the ability to have safe, affordable housing and live in neighborhoods with quality housing and transportation infrastructure is not distributed equitably. Discriminatory policies and practices disadvantage people of color and people with lower incomes. For example, people with a criminal conviction on their record are systematically denied rental housing even though they have served their sentence; Black people are impacted at greater rates because of structural racism in the criminal legal system. Homeownership is one of the most important components for building intergenerational wealth, yet due to redlining, unequal access to credit, and predatory lending, significant racial disparities persist in homeownership rates. Private equity firms that purchase housing and real estate developers’ practices have led to housing being thought of as profit rather than a right.
However, we have the ability and resources to reimagine housing and transportation policies that honor everyone in our country. The Low-Income Tax Credit is an example, which incentivizes private developers to build affordable housing. We can build connected communities with affordable and high-quality transportation by following the lead of community organizers who are often organizing around these issues to build their power to make change.
Additional Reading
- Haberle, M., & House, S., eds. (2021). Racial justice in housing finance: A series on new directions. Washington, D.C.: Poverty & Race Research Action Council. http://www.prrac.org/pdf/racial-justice-in-housing-finance-series-2021.pdf
- Shertzer, A., Twinam, T., & Walsh, R. P. (2022). Zoning and segregation in urban economic history. Regional Science and Urban Economics, 94,103652. https://www.doi.org/10.1016/j.regsciurbeco.2021.103652
- Tehrani, S. O., Wu, S. J., & Roberts, J.D. (2019). The color of health: Residential segregation, light rail transit developments, and gentrification in the United States. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16(19), 3683. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16193683
- Thomas, D. N., Heer, N., Wyatt Mitchell, I., Karner, A., Levine, K., Shuster, J., & Ma, K. (2022). Racial equity, Black America, and public transportation, Volume 1: A review of economic, health, and social impacts. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press. https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/26710/racial-equity-black-america-and-public-transportation-volume-1-a-review-of-economic-health-and-social-impacts
- Quick, K., & Kahlenberg, R.D. (2019). Attacking the Black-white opportunity gap that comes from residential segregation. Washington, D.C.: The Century Foundation. https://tcf.org/content/report/attacking-black-white-opportunity-gap-comes-residential-segregation/