Understanding health disparity causes is an important first step toward developing policies or interventions to eliminate disparities, but their nature makes identifying and addressing their causes challenging.

Last month, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to dedicate $5 million to preventing housing discrimination and to develop an ordinance to protect housing choice voucher holders from source of income discrimination.

As a result of decades of legalized discrimination in the housing industry, huge racial disparities in homeownership still exist today. This is not acceptable in a country founded on equal opportunity.

Despite that consensus, the digital divide is about to get worse, and current policies will exacerbate it. We need to replace those policies with a coordinated approach that provides appropriate incentives for all stakeholders to bridge widening gaps.

We can imagine a future where everyone can find and afford a quality home. Where every neighborhood offers a diversity of housing options. And where people up and down the income ladder can enjoy housing security and build wealth through ownership.

To understand more about housing from an epidemiologist’s perspective, we spoke with Earle Chambers, an associate professor in the Department of Family and Social Medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Affordable housing campaigns are not new, of course, but what is unprecedented and transformative about Opportunity Starts at Home is the scope and diversity of the partners that are joining forces to advocate for more robust and equitable federal housing policies.

"Residential segregation is at the heart of racial inequality in the country. All of the disparities in the U.S. — in education, in income, wealth, employment, health — between the races are all fundamentally linked to residential segregation.

Homeownership often translates to wealth accumulation, and wealth grows generationally. As a result, the wealth gap between white and black families has grown over the past 50 years. In 2016, white wealth was seven times greater than black wealth.

Because many children attend elementary schools in their own neighborhood, a child’s access to high-quality schools is dependent on where they grow up.

When we refer to people who are, or have been, in contact with the criminal justice system as “felons,” “offenders,” “inmates,” or “convicts,” we define them by the worst act of their lives, creating a stigma that lingers long after they’ve paid their debt to society.

More than 50 years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, what would it take to meaningfully reduce residential segregation and/or to mitigate its negative consequences in the United States?

On September 20, 2018, a panel of researchers and practitioners discussed new research and ongoing challenges associated with the HCV program at HUD’s Quarterly Update from the Office of Policy Development and Research.

Neighborhoods are constantly changing as residents come and go, businesses open and close, and properties go up or come down. No place is the same for long.

Trauma is a set of normal human responses to stressful and threatening experiences (National Center for PTSD, 2007).

Young adults ages 18-24 require specific, targeted services and interventions from the juvenile justice and homelessness service providers with whom they interact if they are to achieve successful outcomes and avoid longterm harms.