Creating and Monitoring Healthy Affordable Housing

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

• How planners, designers, affordable-housing advocates, and public health professionals can collaborate to enhance health outcomes through housing-design decisions
• Strategies to engage community members in identifying health conditions that can be improved by changes to the built environment, and to incorporate this input into planning and design
• Metrics and feedback-loop pathways to measure the impact of housing on health

MORE SESSION DETAILS

The design and development of affordable housing provides an opportunity to address health concerns faced by low-income Americans. Learn about the "Health Action Plan," an integrative process for health promotion through affordable housing development. To encourage implementation, the plan developer (Enterprise) included the process in its 2015 Enterprise Green Communities Criteria, piloted it with five community-development corporations, and created consistent measurement tools with NeighborWorks to demonstrate the health outcomes of integrating targeted health features into affordable housing. During this interactive session, speakers representing Enterprise, NeighborWorks, and the pilot project team from Hammond, Louisiana, will describe how they worked together to integrate community health priorities into affordable housing while participants will actively engage with the speakers through a sample charrette centered on the "Health Action Plan" process. Participants will evaluate the design, interpret health data, identify features that could impact human health, and outline metrics to measure the project’s success in addressing prioritized health outcomes.