The Housing Crisis is a Health Crisis
I’ve spent enough of my life in Boston that it’s long been one of the cities I call home. For most of the years I lived there, I was not in the market to buy a home -- partly because I was young enough not to feel the need, and partly because I couldn’t hope to afford it.
And it just keeps getting worse.
In 1995, you could buy a typical home for around $165,000. That same house would now cost $714,000. In terms of mortgage payments, that represents a more than four-fold increase.
But this isn’t just a problem on the coasts, where people have long joked about the high cost of home ownership. Across the whole country, the collision of pandemic-era price surges and rising interest rates has driven monthly payments on median-priced homes up by 59% in just three years, from $2,033 to $3,224.
When families struggle to pay for housing, other essentials get squeezed out of the budget, like preventive healthcare and critical medications. This is to say nothing of the stress attendant to housing instability, which has been shown to exacerbate chronic conditions and mental health challenges.
So important is the connection between housing and health that UnitedHealth Group (UHG) decided to begin investing seriously in affordable housing over five years ago. They had invested over a billion dollars to create over 25,000 affordable homes across 31 states as of last year. The results are striking. Fully 95% of the people living in UHG-backed properties received annual check-ups, and mental health metrics surpassed those of comparable low-income populations nationwide.
Rather than spending a billion dollars to build homes, UHG used a sophisticated, multi-pronged strategy to influence a dramatic increase in affordable housing:
Low-Income Housing Investment Tax Credits
Community Reinvestment Act loans
Direct investments through healthcare business units
Co-location of health and social services near housing developments
UHG’s investments have created more stable living environments that in turn have reduced ER visits, improved mental health, and increased access to preventive care.
Accessible quality housing isn't just about putting roofs over heads, it’s about building the kinds of environments that incentivize and support healthy habits and lifestyles. For politicians, developers, investors, healthcare leaders, and citizens at large, the imperative is clear: addressing housing affordability in turn reduces healthcare costs and allows the young – the least healthcare utilizing demographic, the one with the longest runway to pay for social benefits, and the one bringing new humans into the world to reduce loneliness, another major public health issue – to stick around.
