The Health Impacts of Housing: Toward a Policy-Relevant Research Agenda

Housing is central to our lives. And while it may be seen on one level as principally about shelter, housing importantly provides other benefits. Affordable, appropriate, and adequate housing is argued to have a marked impact on people’s health, their access to labour markets, and an array of other benefits. The ways in which housing impacts upon human health is considered in this report which presents a scoping study of the health impacts of housing. Our study has been undertaken using the new AHURI Investigative Panel methodology. We set out to establish the current level of knowledge and major research gaps in the housing and health field. We used a focused literature review to initiate this process. The aim of the review was to provide a foundation for the construction of a viable Australian research agenda on the relationship between housing and health. The review conceptualised the non-shelter outcomes of housing using scholarly work from both the housing and health disciplines. The latter has a well-established and widely recognised conceptual framework for engaging with the housing–health interface.