Housing Has Healing Abilities But at What Copay?

AUSTIN, TX—Homelessness and inadequate housing are not only problems of poverty, but major health issues. Across the country, options for affordable housing are fast dwindling while rates of homelessness rise–a crisis exacerbated by a rapidly expanding health-wealth gap.

A panel discussed this theme, “Housing as Medicine: Can We Afford the Rx?” yesterday at South By Southwest held at the JW Marriott. The panel pondered, in an age where a medical diagnosis can be accessed through an app and vital signs monitored through a wristwatch, how can the industry innovate its way out of the affordable housing and homelessness crisis? These business, healthcare, government and community innovators shared how cities are using data-driven approaches and developing public-private citizen partnerships to implement smart policies.

Speakers included Laurel Blatchford, Enterprise Community Partners president and former HUD chief of staff; Bechara Choucair of Kaiser Permanente, Rosanne Haggerty of Community Solutions, and Bobby Watts of National Health Care for the Homeless Council.

“We know that by integrating health into the development and preservation of affordable homes, and by conceiving of well-designed homes as a platform for health, we can make communities healthier and lower costs for families and for the healthcare system at large,” Blatchford tells GlobeSt.com. “To do just that, we recently launched our national Health Begins with Home initiative. Working with a broad group of partners, including Kaiser Permanente, and guided by data, we’re initially putting $250 million to work over the next five years to harness the power of affordable homes to create healthier families and stronger communities.”

As part of Health Begins with Home, Enterprise is preparing to release the results of a first-of-its-kind survey on the connection between homes and health as experienced by renters and medical professionals. The study found that lower-income renters are paying on average 44% of income for rent, leading to difficult tradeoffs including foregoing healthcare, and 35% of renters have moved to a new home because previous homes were too expensive, which can add to toxic stress.

“Given the magnitude of the housing challenge our country faces, we need to think bigger and more disruptively, harnessing technology to enable and scale new solutions, and bringing entrepreneurial market forces to bear,” Blatchford tells GlobeSt.com. “I’m personally excited about the level of innovation in the sector and the billions flowing into what has been dubbed proptech. But this investment and the solutions being offered so far are mostly not geared towards increasing affordability.”

Blatchford says Enterprise believes there is great potential to change how housing is consumed, financed and regulated.

“We believe that technology can facilitate new business models and opportunities to fundamentally change how supply and demand functions in the current housing market,” she says. “We’ve begun making exploratory investments in early-stage tech start-ups in partnership with New York-based venture capital firm MetaProp. We’re focused on rapidly scalable tech-enabled platforms that we are categorizing as ‘HousingTech’.”

With MetaProp, Enterprise is investigating possibilities such as how to help people find new places to live that already exist but are not part of the formal housing stock. That is, the 3.6 million empty bedrooms in the top 100 housing markets.

And, how to enable homebuyers and renters to enter into new forms of tenure, whether it is fractional ownership or rental agreements, that allow greater mobility and flexibility? Finally, what new capital and credit structures can give more people access to the home-buying market and more predictability or even upside in the rental market?