WUOT’s Dr. Carole Myers: Housing is a basic need and a key direct and indirect driver of health outcomes. The Sycamore Institute, a nonpartisan Public Policy Research Center in Nashville, has recently conducted an analysis of housing in Tennessee. My guest today, Brian Straessle is the executive director of the Sycamore Institute. Brian, welcome to HealthConnections. Thanks, Carol. Great to be with you. Why does housing matter?
Brian Straessle: A lot of reasons for most of us, housing is the single largest expense, you know, of all the things we pay for housing is number one, and that expense is obviously a lot more expensive today than it was just five years ago. And while incomes have also grown, they have not grown nearly as fast, and a home is so much more than shelter where we live and what we pay to live there affect almost every aspect of our lives.
Could you say more about that? How does it affect other aspects of our life?
Where you live affects where you go to school, what jobs are nearby, how long is your commute? Can you easily get to a doctor? Do your kids have safe places to play outside the community that you're in also affects a lot about your life. Do you have people that you can lean on? And you go to your next door neighbor and say, hey, my kid's sick, can you go on an errand? Can you go pick up the prescription from Walgreens? Are there people in your community who can connect you and expand your network and give you opportunities that might otherwise be out of reach.
What are the key takeaways from the report?
I mean, the number one is that housing is a really key driver of Individual and Family Well Being, and it's also important component of thriving communities. Housing affects economic security, economic growth. It can impact our health. Has a huge impact on transportation. How much time are we sitting in traffic every day to get from A to B really depends on where we decide to build housing. The City and the community where a home is located has a big impact on the educational opportunities that are available to children in that community when there's not enough housing in one market that can spill over across an entire region. You know, if big employment centers don't have enough housing for the people who work there, that impact gets felt very far and wide. Housing also obviously has a lot to do with how we pay for local government, property taxes and the costs of and demand for local infrastructure all really driven by housing. You know, as I said, home ownership, the community that you're in, the options that are in those communities all affect civic life, social capital and the opportunities available to us. And then obviously, more broadly, thinking about energy, the environment, the way that we build houses, the characteristics of that housing that affects what it costs to run utilities. What's the impact on sort of farmland and the natural environment when, if we're building outward and putting housing up in places that used to be open space, there's this threshold for being considered cost burdened on housing like 30% of your income and the share of Tennesseans across every metro area in the state that's cost burdened has been going up. So more and more of us are having to pay more and more of our income just to keep a roof over our heads. And it's really a challenge of supply and demand, where we have a lot of people who want to live in a place, and not enough places for them to live there, and that drives up the price.
From the part of the report that you've done thus far, are you able to derive any actionable policy recommendations?
So that's another thing that we're going to be working on. Later this year, we'll have a third report on housing, focusing on the levers that policy makers can pull to make an impact in the housing market, and who at the state or the local level is able to pull them. And the tools that you might want to focus on, they're going to depend on which part of the housing market you're most concerned about. Most of these tools are not one size fits all. It'll fix everything with a magic wand.
This transcript has been lightly edited for content.
You can find a link to the The Sycamore Institute's report, Why Housings Matters in Tennessee, here.