Trackers map climate resilience in affordable housing developments in Brazil, U.S.

From homes with air-conditioning and lead-free pipes to neighborhoods that are safe and walkable to municipal storm levees and tornado warning systems, where people live profoundly affects their health and safety. As the climate changes, housing and communities will have to adapt so people can stay healthy even as temperatures rise and extreme weather events become more common. 

Historically, affordable housing programs have been designed without explicit consideration of the health of their residents, let alone how the housing will hold up to climate change. Researchers at the People, Health and Place Unit of the Prevention Research Center at the Andrew M. and Jane M. Bursky School of Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis have created two dashboards to track the climate resilience of affordable housing units in Brazil and the U.S. so planners, policymakers, residents and researchers will have the information they need to make decisions that promote public health. 

“The built environment impacts people’s lives and health in every way,” said Rodrigo Reis, MS, PhD, a professor at the Bursky School who led both projects. “Housing, transportation and urban planning shape living conditions, mobility patterns and environmental exposures. I have been focusing on how we can make changes outside the health sector that will make people healthier and our communities more climate resilient.” 

The first dashboard, called the MCMV Climate Resilience Tracker, looks at the largest public housing development in the Americas: the Minha Casa, Minha Vida program in Brazil. Launched in 2009, Minha Casa, Minha Vida (which means ‘My Home, My Life’) has built more than 6 million homes for low- and lower middle-income families across the country, with millions more under construction. The dashboard presents data on nearly 4,000 housing developments for the lowest-income families, with each site comprising dozens or hundreds of homes. The researchers integrated data from the Brazilian Ministry of Cities, population census, and climate hazard data to create a measure of each site’s climate resilience. 

The second dashboard opens a window into affordable housing in the U.S. with the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative Data Tracker. A program of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative is aimed at transforming distressed, low-income neighborhoods into sustainable, mixed-income communities. More than 150 grants have been awarded since the program was started in 2010, including one to the City of St. Louis to revitalize the Near North Side neighborhood. The tracker presents data on socio-economic, health, infrastructure, and climate indicators across the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative sites, and compares them to local averages to give a measure of the health equity between public housing residents and other residents of the area.

Both dashboards are designed to provide critical data in an easy-to-understand way so they can be used to inform policy interventions and planning decisions. 

“Public housing and other federally supported housing tend to be located in neighborhoods that have experienced long-term disinvestments and in areas with higher climate risk, like flood-prone zones,” said postdoctoral researcher Yi Wang, PhD, who led the development of the two dashboards. “Residents of public housing are already more vulnerable to external shocks because of their lower income, and on top of that, public housing is home to more seniors and more people with disabilities, who are vulnerable in their own right. That’s why building climate resilience into affordable housing programs from the beginning is very important.”

Tamara Schneider, MPH, PhD, is the assistant director of communications and senior science writer at Bursky Public Health. She holds a bachelor’s degree in molecular biophysics & biochemistry and in sociology from Yale University, a master’s in public health from the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD in biomedical science from the University of California, San Diego. She joined WashU as a science writer in 2016.