Poverty, Housing, and Health

Tonight on PBS was the first of three reports collectively entitled "Unnatural Causes". It's about why some of us get sicker more often and die sooner and what causes us to fall ill in the first place. The first report, called "In Sickness and in Wealth" looked at the correlation between the growing gap between the rich and the poor. It says a lot about why affordable housing, among other indicators of an equitable society, is so important for one's physical health. (Video clip)

In some cities, just a few miles apart, the average life span is more than 10 years longer for those who are relatively more wealthy. The stereotype of the poor not being smart enough to take care of themselves and thus being more sick is far from the truth. In fact it has everything to do with sense of powerlessness of being trapped in poverty. Those who have options have considerably less stress in their lives.

The unending stress of childhood poverty can have lifelong health consequences. Jack Shonkoff of the Harvard Center on the Developing Child:

"Just the burden of day after day not knowing whether there's going to be food on the table or not knowing whether you're going to have a roof over your head, is actually toxic to the brain. So we begin to see in children who experience toxic stress long-term impacts of what's basically been chemically damaging to their brains. The concept here is the pile-up of risk, the cumulative burden of having things that are increasing your chances of having problems, as opposed to the cumulative protection of having things in your life that increase the likelihood that you can have better outcomes.

Economic security may offer some of those cumulative health benefits. In another cold virus study, home ownership was considered as a factor. People were asked if their parents own their own home. It turned out that a child whose parent did not own their family home is much more likely to succumb to a cold virus as an adult. In fact, the more years their parents owned a home, the less likely they'd be to get a cold when we expose them to a virus. A brain that's been subjected to more disruption, an immune system that's been more threatened.

As the gap grows between the poor and the wealthy it may be that this generation will be the first in a century to see a decline in life expectancy. The program makes the argument that advances in medicine, while helpful, did not make as much difference in life expectancy as did the broad advances in general income and relative freedom from worry about merely sustaining one's life.

Not only is affordable housing the right thing to ensure, it also reduces the health care costs we all bear. The total cost of poverty, includes lack of opportunity, lack of contribution, direct welfare costs, families broken by the stress, crime and stress on the justice system, and much more that falls through the cracks of ineffectual charity. Social justice, economic equity are really health issues and ensuring a fair and equitable society is then also a matter of self interest.