Resources to Support Your Efforts

Health and Housing

Check out resources to guide your efforts to integrate housing options (rental, subsidized, and market-rate) and create neighborhoods that reduce isolation, crime and violence. These resources have been selected to provide insight into strategies that support healthy homes in healthy neighborhoods and reduce overcrowding, overpayment, infestation, mold, and longer work commutes - all of which can further compromise residents’ health and well-being.

Resources

Aging Well in Communities: A Toolkit for Planning, Engagement & Action The Center for Civic Partnerships has produced a toolkit outlining a community-based planning process to promote healthy aging. The Toolkit is a user-friendly guide to help local governments, human service providers, community groups and other partners plan now to address both the challenges and opportunities that are coming.

Universal Design: Housing for the Lifespan of All People A publication from the Center for Universal Design on accessible, adaptable, and universal design housing features or features in housing intended for use by people with disabilities and others.

Design for Health: Considering Environment and Housing Issues through Comprehensive Planning and Ordinances This information sheet discusses a number of opportunities that planners have to address environment and housing issues through planning and policy approaches, specifically with regard to the effect brownfields and housing quality have on human physical, psychological, and social health.

Design for Health: Promoting Food Access with Comprehensive Planning and Ordinances This information sheet discusses a number of opportunities that planners have to address food issues through planning and policy approaches, by addressing challenges related to healthy food access and local food production.

National Center for Healthy Housing NCHH promotes conducts research, provides a searchable clearinghouse of resources, and supports implementation of policies that encourage safe, decent, and sanitary housing as a means for preventing disease and injury.

Healthy Housing Reference Manual The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's manual describes the basic principles of safe and healthy housing in terms of the physiological, psychological, and protection needs that housing provides as well as twelve other chapters on topics from electricity to residential swimming pools to indoor air pollution.

AARP Public Policy Institute: Opportunities for Creating Livable Communities AARP’s Livable Communities Team examines critical public policy issues that affect the ability of people to successfully age in their homes and communities by promoting the livability of communities through affordable and accessible housing and mobility options.