New Article: Emily A. Benfer, Housing is Health: Prioritizing Health Justice and Equity in the U.S. Eviction System, 22 Yale J. Health Pol’y, L. & Ethics 49 (2024). Abstract below:
The public health field has long recognized the association between housing and health. In one of the most poignant examples of housing as a social determinant of health, the COVID-19 pandemic amplified the link between an individual’s housing instability and community-wide health. “Housing is health” became the justification for halting the eviction system: Policymakers nationwide adopted moratoria, eviction protections, emergency rental assistance, and other housing supports with the goal of protecting community-wide health. These robust measures resulted in unprecedented low eviction filing rates and extensive benefits to individual and public health. Today, with the lapse of pandemic interventions, the eviction crisis is reemerging as a pervasive threat to public health. Eviction filing rates have returned to or surpassed historical averages in jurisdictions across the United States. Policymakers across the country are called to address the eviction system as an urgent public health priority.
This Article applies the World Health Organization Conceptual Social Determinants of Health model and the Health Justice Framework to the United States eviction system to demonstrate how it operates a structural determinant of health inequity that severely harms historically marginalized groups. Eviction disproportionately affects Black renters, who are filed against at more than five times the rate of white renters. Overwhelmingly, Black women and families with young children are evicted at the highest rates. In a typical year, 7.6 million people—40 percent of whom are children—live in households that receive one or more eviction filings and are at risk of housing loss. For all of these people, interaction with the ostensibly neutral eviction system is associated with severe and lasting health harms across the life course. This Article extensively documents the public health and social science evidence demonstrating that housing is health and linking eviction to negative health outcomes. It provides evidence-based examples of structural determinants in the eviction system—including court processes, laws, policies, and landlord management and screening practices—that comprise the scaffolding of health inequity. Finally, this Article offers a model for achieving health equity and housing stability through the application of the Health Justice Framework to the U.S. eviction system.
Poverty Law 