Healthy Homes an Important Healthcare Factor

In reading your blog, the majority of the postings and subsequent comments seem to be surrounding the issue of healthcare—an issue that warrants much discussion as more and more of our fellow North Carolinians find themselves without care and unable to pay for it.  I wanted to add to that conversation as it relates to another issue climbing toward crisis currently in our state and around the country: affordable, safe and decent housing.  The NC Housing Coalition recently released a study detailing the links between NC kids’ health and wellbeing and safe, decent housing, if you want to check it out…more on that later. 

Both housing and healthcare are basic human needs and rights, necessary for individuals to grow and prosper.  More and more families cannot afford the growing costs of both health insurance and housing.  So what does that look like?  Often, families must choose one over the other.  Sometimes, families pay for both and then are faced with too much month at the end of the paycheck, unable to pay for necessities such as food, gasoline, school supplies, clothes, shoes, etc. etc. etc.  And still other times, families can afford neither.  Their incomes are just above the poverty line ($20,600 for a family of four) and federal program income and savings restrictions, so they aren’t eligible for housing assistance or Medicaid (or SCHIP?—we’ll see).  As far as housing is concerned, this leaves them staring down the barrel of a choice that includes no housing or substandard housing.  In choosing substandard housing with fingers crossed that the lead paint exposure won’t be that bad, they are forced to make a choice for themselves and their children that often times leads to poor health and growing medical expenses.  As our state’s families get sicker in substandard housing, it becomes clear that failing health and untreated injuries, while the products of a lack of health insurance, are also the results of the lack of housing that is both decent and affordable.        

Housing quality is associated with morbidity from infectious diseases, chronic illnesses, injuries, poor nutrition and mental illness.  For kids especially, the health risks, both short and long term, associated with living in substandard housing are alarming—and costly– both for families and for the state.  The study commissioned by the NC Housing Coalition found that the conservative economic cost of substandard housing- related childhood illness and disability is $95 million in North Carolina.  This is the “for now” estimate, and doesn’t include future economic loss due to the obvious fact that today’s children are tomorrow’s workers.  Those mentally, physically or intellectually handicapped by substandard housing conditions as children may not be as able to contribute to our state’s economic sustainability and growth in the long term.

Federal neglect in the areas of affordable housing and affordable healthcare is beyond obvious.  Our state’s response to an ever growing number of families who can’t afford both healthcare and housing was needed long ago, and still we wait.  As far as housing goes, more than 2 million North Carolinians are currently experiencing housing issues ranging from inability to afford decent housing to living in substandard housing.  Despite that great and growing number, the state legislature voted to cut overall funding for the Housing Trust Fund in 2007, the only funding vehicle (that has won national awards for innovation and efficiency, I might add) to support and expand the creation and rehabilitation of decent, affordable housing in our state.

An “ounce of prevention’s worth a pound of cure”, goes the old adage.  Too bad our legislators at the Federal and state levels don’t have this tattooed somewhere to remind them when it comes down to their votes for healthcare…and for housing too.