MIT CoLab as Policies for Action Hub
Healthy Communities through Housing Justice: Combating Racial Health Inequities through Community-Driven Housing Interventions
MIT CoLab’s “Policies for Action” Research Hub, funded by a multi-year grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, studies community-driven housing interventions and their impacts on racial inequities in health and well-being.
Housing conditions are broadly understood to affect health, with research linking cost, crowding, unit quality, homelessness, eviction, foreclosure and other individual-level housing exposures to a wide range of mental and physical health outcomes. These exposures are often understood as distinct from one another, with equally distinct policy interventions.
Policy recommendations largely address what can be done to address specific threats, such as preventing evictions or reducing environmental health hazards in units. But, given this focus, currently available research can overlook policy responses that target structural racism in the housing market and its impacts on health. By contrast, the field of urban planning increasingly views housing market conditions–including overcrowding, substandard unit conditions, rising housing costs, and housing instability–as consequences of market-based approaches to housing provision and the racial wealth disparities they enable.
Dr. Lawrence Vale
Ford Professor Urban Design and Planning, and Associate Dean, School of Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dr. Mariana Arcaya
Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Health, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This project investigates the health equity implications of local housing innovations that directly address mechanisms enabling racial disparities in the burden of housing costs.The study will examine four community-driven housing interventions: Community Land Trusts (CLTs); Housing Innovations in Green Energy; Inclusionary Housing; and Reparations.
In addition to national scans of these initiatives, the hub’s projects focus on emerging local innovations that are explicitly using antiracist approaches to limit racialized wealth extraction and dispossession of minoritized people. These studies will be advised by a multi-racial consortium of residents and community-based organization leaders with whom study personnel have pre-existing strong relationships, including work in the metropolitan areas of Boston and Chicago; Fresno and Merced, California; and Memphis, Tennessee. Several questions underpin the research:
1. How are mid-sized cities and surrounding mid-sized municipalities enacting policies related to CLTs, housing innovations in green energy, inclusionary housing policies, and Black-centered housing reparations in pursuit of anti-racist housing outcomes?
2. How do municipalities and their stakeholders incorporate anti-racist processes in the design of policies in these four areas?
3. How do policies that challenge the ability of landlords, development firms, and institutional investors in housing to profit off of the dispossession and displacement of Black and other minoritized people affect health?
4. How can findings about health and housing outcomes for targeted households involved in particular housing policy interventions be used to reverse racial/ethnic disparities?
The Policies for Action (P4A) Hub is co-directed by Professors Mariana Arcaya and Larry Vale, in collaboration with CoLab leadership and numerous university and NGO partners.
The Works CDC
Staff at the Works Community Development Corporation delivered groceries to residents during the pandemic. In addition to developing affordable housing, they implement food security programs including a mobile grocery store in the Klondike neighborhood and a grocery store and farmer’s market in South Memphis.
Photo Credit: The Works, Inc.
Klondike Community Land Trust
In the Klondike neighborhood of Memphis, TN, residents participate in a neighborhood census and review renderings of the affordable, mixed-use redesign of a vacant school. This research partner of the P4A Hub, is forming alongside the redevelopment to promote long-term neighborhood affordability in this historic Black neighborhood.
Photo credit: Brandon Dill