Why Does Habitability Matter? Health and Our Housing Stock — Shelterforce Shelterforce

Roach and mice infestations, broken AC units, black mold. We all have a housing horror story. Mine was a leaky roof that allowed brown New York City roof water to pour through my ceiling, destroying my mattress. Throughout one rainstorm, I had to catch the water using several improvised receptacles, including bed risers turned upside down.

Whether a home is “habitable” matters for a lot more than aesthetic appeal and comfort. It’s a health issue—and sometimes even a matter of life or death.

For example:

• In New York City, hot weather claims 500 lives each year. Most of those heat-related deaths occur in inadequately cooled homes.
• Half of all homes in the U.S. have either mold or moisture problems that can lead to mold. Mold can cause or worsen a range of health problems, including asthma.
• Almost 30 million homes in the U.S. contain hazardous lead paint. Lead poisoning contributes to cognitive problems and cardiovascular disease and causes millions of deaths around the world every year, with an estimated 400,000 annual deaths in the U.S. alone, according to one study.

Homes in disrepair put lives in disrepair. Living in a stable, safe home is crucial for maintaining your physical and mental health, holding down a job, and getting your kids to school every day.

There’s some hope on the horizon. Across the country, tenants and lawmakers have pushed for laws that could create healthier, safer homes. Some of these laws would require landlords to remediate mold in apartments and cool units in the summer.

But what determines whether a home is safe and functional? It’s not entirely up to chance.

Your experiences—and the severity of problems in your home—may vary based on a number of factors. For instance, did you know who we are and where we live play a role in how safe and healthy our homes are? Are you poor, middle class, or wealthy? Are you a renter or a homeowner? Are you able-bodied, or is it difficult for you to leave your home and seek a cooling shelter when temperatures skyrocket?

In states like California, Nevada, and Arizona, dry heat brings constant threats of wildfires. In Florida and Louisiana, damp conditions cause mold to grow. And climate change, which has made extreme weather events like flooding and hurricanes more frequent and more severe, has made housing conditions worse throughout the country.

And then there are the legal differences. Most states—except Arkansas—require landlords to provide renters with a habitable home. But does your state allow you to withhold rent when your landlord leaves you, teeth chattering, to sleep with a broken radiator in the winter? It may not.

When Shelterforce decided to take on this series, I didn’t realize how many intersecting variables go into a livable home.

In New Orleans, our investigative reporter discovered, many people live in midcentury multifamily complexes that aren’t properly waterproofed or cooled.

In the Bay Area, where I’m from, my childhood home and many others don’t have AC units or central air because our mild climate never required them. With warming summers, that’s no longer the case. Houses and apartment buildings have been constructed differently across the nation, often with weather conditions in mind that have since changed.

In this series, we’ll be traveling to Roswell, New Mexico, where flash floods swept through the city last year, causing two deaths and hundreds of millions of dollars of damage in the area. One landlord we spoke with said the storm rendered her duplex unlivable—she had to repair the insulation, drywall, electrical, plumbing, and floors.

We’ll walk through New Orleans, where the devastation brought by Hurricane Katrina 20 years ago still hasn’t been repaired, and subsequent storms have compounded the problem. (An organizer Shelterforce spoke with said the water-damaged walls in a home he visited recently curled like a “gigantic ice cream scoop carving out soft ice cream.”)

We’ll also look at Cambridge, Massachusetts, where an ambitious public housing authority has revamped its homes using RAD and other funding.

This Under the Lens series has a lot of crossover with our previous series. I recommend checking out, “Not Just Ramps—Disability and Housing Justice,” to get more context about how disability affects whether a home is livable. For a look at how climate takes a toll on habitability, check out, “Dual Crises: Housing in a Changing Climate.”

I hope you enjoy this new series. It’s a heavy topic, but there’s plenty to celebrate. The tenants, experts, and people in the field we spoke with are working to fix people’s homes. They’re using innovative programs, combining government funding sources, and banding together to demand better.

Thank you for reading!

We’re always looking to expand our coverage. We certainly won’t be confining our coverage of habitability to this series—think of it as a jumping-off point. If you have a story to submit to Shelterforce relating to unhealthy living conditions, visit this page. If you have tips, write to us at [email protected].

About the Author

Lara Heard

Lara Heard is Shelterforce’s associate editor.