Introduction

The strong link between health and housing is magnified for people experiencing homelessness. Living conditions—the stress and conflict of crowded shelters or living on the streets, emotional trauma, unsanitary conditions, poor nutrition, sleep deprivation, and violence and sexual abuse—contribute to poor mental and physical health. Healthcare costs are particularly high for people without shelter and social support because it is often rendered in hospitals and at emergency rooms.

Part Two of our series, Good Health Depends on Decent Housing, reports on how helping people who are currently experiencing homelessness with housing and other needs is not only life-changing, but also saves money.

Every person, every family needs a decent, secure home. Housing is the foundation for human dignity and wellbeing and this, in turn, profoundly influences health, economic mobility, and thriving communities. Underscoring this fundamental need, sociologist Matthew Desmond wrote that the development of affordable housing is “an antipoverty effort, human capital investment, community improvement plan, and public health initiative all rolled into one.”

Too often, the policy choice in the United States is to treat land and housing as a profit-generating commodity. In Hawaiʻi, this policy is most clearly demonstrated through the systematic separation of Native Hawaiians from their ancestral lands, and the very limited public effort that has been made to restore their rights to self-determination. 

Because we have failed to recognize the transcendent value of land and homes to the wellbeing of individuals and our communities, we have not embraced a policy that protects the right to adequate housing for low- and middle-income families. Our housing policy failures clearly result in lifelong harm to the individuals affected, but the damage doesn't end there. These failures come at a high cost to all of us, and one of the most notable is expensive health disparities.