In what ways do poor housing conditions contribute to bad health?

[Journalguy33]

Hi, I'm a student journalist at the University of Georgia and I'm writing a story on how bad housing can cause bad health. Any information or links that you can provide are greatly appreciated!

[juilletmercredi]

Have you searched PubMed, the public database of peer-reviewed scientific journals in health and medicine? Try that. There is a lot of research in this area, and a search there will yield many, many articles on the relationship between housing and health - especially depending on what you mean by "housing" (do you mean the actual building in which people live, or the location of that building, or the neighborhood?)

I would wager that given the length of the average new story, you might want to narrow this down and focus on something more specific. There are many books written on this topic - it could fill several volumes.

One book that may be of interest is Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, by Eric Klinenberg. It is about the week-long heat wave in Chicago during the summer of 1995 and the effects it had on residents, particularly low-income and elderly residents living in poor neighborhoods and public housing projects.

Another seminal case in this area is the Kennedy Krieger Institute's study of how different levels of lead paint abatement affected children's development in housing projects in Baltimore. The problem is that KKI didn't give complete, understandable warning to the families moving into these housing projects that there was some level of risk from the lead paint, and some children suffered permanent damage due to being exposed to this common household contaminant. There's a NYT story from 2001 (here: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/24/us/us-investigating-johns-hopkins-study-of-lead-paint-hazard.html) and more recent stories in FiveThirtyEight (here: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/baltimores-toxic-legacy-of-lead-paint/) and ABC (here: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/Wellness/baltimores-kennedy-krieger-institute-sued-lead-paint-study/story?id=14536695 ). You can probably fine more if you dig a bit.

The classic public health/epidemiology story is also a case of how where you live can affect your health: John Snow, commonly known as the "father of epidemiology," discovered that families that lived in certain areas of London were more susceptible to cholera than others. He determined it was based on where they got their water from: the Thames River was absolutely disgusting and had pathogens in it that led to cholera, whereas families who lived a further distance and got their water elsewhere were doing better.