Equity and health in housing coverage: A preliminary news analysis from Northern California
Wednesday, May 29, 2019Housing impacts health in widespread, well-documented ways that affect both quality and length of life.1 As a key determinant of health, housing instability stands to widen already stark racial and health inequities. As such, a growing number of public health organizations and practitioners are seeking ways to ensure all residents have access to safe, affordable homes. While the connection between housing and health is clear, there is less research and even fewer recommendations on how public health practitioners can engage in addressing this challenging issue. This is especially true when it comes to communication, leaving public health practitioners with little guidance on how they can talk about housing strategically to support policy and systems changes that decrease racial and health inequities. Understanding how the news media frame housing policy — and whether a health frame is included — can help address this research gap and support practitioners in more effectively strengthening housing policy. That's because news coverage provides a window into the public discourse around any issue and sets the agenda for what issues the public and policymakers think about — and how they think about them.2,3,4,5,6 News coverage also influences what solutions people support. To better understand how the housing crisis is portrayed in the news, Berkeley Media Studies Group analyzed coverage from the San Francisco Bay Area — the epicenter of the crisis — and paid special attention to how equity and health appear in the news, providing insights for housing advocates working across the country.7Background
Complex policy decisions at the local, state, and federal levels contribute to increasing housing costs, housing instability, and poor health outcomes. In response to the San Francisco Bay Area's housing crisis, a diverse, multisector set of partners called The Committee to House the Bay Area, or CASA, created a set of local, regional, and state policy and funding recommendations, called the CASA Compact. To push CASA to emphasize equity and health, the Bay Area Regional Health Inequities Initiative (BARHII), a coalition of 11 Bay Area local health departments, facilitated an equity cabinet of public health and tenants' rights organizations. The cabinet was funded by the San Francisco Foundation and worked to ensure equity and health appeared in both the CASA recommendations and news coverage. This group inserted equity and health into the public conversation about CASA and successfully influenced the CASA process to ensure that it included some of the priorities of renters, communities of color, and others most affected by the health consequences of the Bay Area's housing instability. One of the equity cabinet's key policy and communication strategies has been focusing on what BARHII, and now CASA, refers to as the 3Ps: protecting people from displacement, preserving existing affordable housing, and producing new affordable housing. This focus on setting and meeting concrete goals for the 3Ps kept the conversation solutions-focused and maintained many of the protection and preservation strategies championed by tenants, despite strong political pressure to weaken or remove them. Like many health equity issues, the causes and solutions to the housing crisis in the Bay Area are complicated. Even with the equity cabinet working to keep equity and health at the forefront, cabinet members and other groups have been concerned that the recommendations do not go far enough to advance equitable solutions for the communities hardest hit by the housing crisis and could lead to further displacement of communities of color from urban areas. Additionally, some smaller jurisdictions with wealthier populations have voiced concerns that the CASA Compact's regionally focused recommendations infringe on local control and will diminish the "small-town" atmosphere by increasing density and affordable housing; this will make keeping policy and communication focused on health equity an ongoing challenge.What we did
The complex CASA process makes it a unique window through which to evaluate news about housing. In BMSG's news analysis, we wanted to know:- When the CASA Compact appeared in Bay Area news coverage, how did it compare with coverage of the housing crisis more broadly?
- How did the 3Ps (preservation, protection, and production) appear in news coverage about CASA and about the wider housing crisis?
- Were equity and health part of the news conversation about CASA?
- What can we learn from this analysis that helps others working at the intersection of housing and health and points to future research questions?