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22 Yale J. Health Pol'y L. & Ethics 49 (2023-2024)
Housing Is Health: Prioritizing Health Justice and Equity in the U.S. Eviction System

handle is hein.journals/yjhple22 and id is 240 raw text is: Housing is Health: Prioritizing Health Justice and Equity in the U.S. Eviction System Emily A. Benfer* Abstract: The public health field has long recognized the association between housing and health. In one ofthe most poignant examples of housing as a social determinant of health, the COVID-19 pandemic amplified the link between an individual's housing instability and community-wide health. Housing is health became the justification for halting the eviction system: Policymakers nationwide adopted moratoria, eviction protections, emergency rental assistance, and other housing supports with the goal of protecting community-wide health. These robust measures resulted in unprecedented low eviction filing rates and extensive benefits to individual and public health. Today, with the lapse of pandemic interventions, the eviction crisis is reemerging as a pervasive threat to public health. Eviction filing rates have returned to or surpassed historical averages in jurisdictions across the United States. Policymakers across the country are called to address the eviction system as an urgent public health priority. This Article applies the World Health Organization Conceptual Social Determinants of Health model and the Health Justice Framework to the United States eviction system to demonstrate how it operates a structural determinant of health inequity that severely harms historically marginalized groups. Eviction disproportionately affects Black renters, who are filed against at more than five times the rate of white renters. Overwhelmingly, Black women and families with * Associate Professor of Clinical Law, Director of the Health Equity Policy & Advocacy Clinic, George Washington University Law School; Research Collaborator, The Eviction Lab at Princeton University; former Senior Advisor to the White House and American Rescue Plan Implementation Team; LLM, Georgetown Law Center; JD, Indiana University McKinney School of Law. I express my gratitude to: George Washington University Law School students Declan Glueck and Hagar Sivan and reference librarian Andrew Winston for their excellent research assistance; Dean Dayna Bowen Matthew and Associate Deans Michael Abramowitz and Thomas Colby for their support of research and scholarship; and the numerous experts and scholars who provided feedback, deepened my thinking on this subject, and greatly enhanced this article, including Matthew Desmond, Eric Dunn, Jeremy Bearer-Friend, PeterHepburn, Norrinda Brown Hyatt, Danya Keene, Heidi Liu, Dayna Bowen Matthew, Jamila Michener, Portia Pedro, Rasheedah Phillips, John Pollock, Florence Wagman Roisman, Kathryn Sabbeth, Andrew Scherer, Joshua Schwartz, Alicia Solow-Niederman, Jessica Steinberg, Lauren Sudeall, Nicole Summers, Tania Valdez, Kate Weisburd, Lindsay Wiley, Ruqaiijah Yearby. 49