Housing is Public Health - Having an Address

Take a moment to consider all the factors that impact your health. What comes to mind? Your diet, perhaps your lifestyle, like whether you exercise, drink or smoke? Maybe you thought about your family history of diseases like cancer or diabetes. But health and wellbeing go beyond that. The field of public health is about thinking broader, thinking beyond the individual, about how our built environment affects us, how laws and policies impact us, and how the social forces influence our behavior and wellbeing. Each week, this podcast will discuss one topic from the wonderful world of public health. To reveal these ubiquitous hidden forces and artifacts, one episode at a time, we will show how public health is all around us. Welcome to Everything is Public Health. Everything is public health. So I have a lot of weird hobbies and no, okay, you're going to see what I'm going with this. Trust me. Just stick with me on this. No. I'm with you. I have a lot of weird hobbies. And one of my weird hobbies is hosting trivia and making like board games. That's weird. That's kind of weird. No, the hosting trivia is not weird. The making the board games, that's a little bit of weird hobby. So when I say making board games, I don't actually like make actual board games. It's like I think about game mechanics that I could use in my trivia. So it's hard to explain. Anyway, I host trivia and I make board games on the side as a hobby. I'm sorry. No, it's okay. That's a normal reaction to someone who says that. That's what they do. That's a hobby. But I make trivia and I make board games on the side. And one of the things that's very important to game design is game balance. So you never want to design a game where one person has all the power and all the resources because that's not a fun game. You want to make sure the game is balanced. You want to make sure that everyone has a semblance of competitiveness. And if they don't start out with the same resources, you need to consider things to counter balance that. So if one player starts out with more of X, you need to maybe give the other player more of Y. So it's roughly equal. And you never want. Right. Otherwise, it's not fun because you just you just get whooped on otherwise not fun. Yeah. You just get whooped on. And another thing that you want to make sure you don't do is you don't want to make sure you put your players in a cash 22 situation. The example of that is monopoly. You need property to generate cash, but you need cash to buy property, right? And that's kind of the essence of monopoly and you generally don't want to put players in that situation. Yeah. Now, so you're probably wondering why I'm bringing this up and I'm bringing this up because in the United States, we often have systems that puts people in that cash 22 position all the time. We're not playing in a balance game when it comes to living in the United States and housing is a very big example of that. So that's really interesting. I hadn't thought about it like that. Yeah, but today's episode, it's going to be one in a series of episodes about housing and why housing is public health. And we're going to be talking about homelessness. And when you think the word homelessness, the image that comes to your mind is oftentimes the stereotypical image of tents of people, you know, begging for money, people who, you know, living on the streets, having showered in a while, have dirt on their face, et cetera. That's the stereotypical. Yeah. And the media portrays, right, so we see sort of dirty, smelly people who are just wanting money from people like that's the image that you get often from the media when people think about homelessness. Yeah. And that image is while those people, you know, that image certainly exists somewhere. But that is not, that doesn't capture what homelessness is in general. So we're going to do a thought experiment today. Well, I say thought experiment, but for many people, this is not a thought experiment. This is, this is the situation that they're in. So you can be homeless, but not on the street. For example, you could be living in your car. So you have clothes, you have money so that you're not immediately suffering the consequences of the weather and the environment, or you could be crashing on a friend's couch that also counts as homeless. So here's the thought experiment. Let's say you're in a situation like that where all your immediate physical needs are taken care of. You have access to water, you have access to food, maybe not good food, but you have access to some sort of calories that keeps you going and you have access to a shelter. Be that a van, a car, or you're crashing on your friend's couch. All you don't have is an address. You have everything else that take care is for immediate need, but all you don't have is an address. So that's play through that thought experiment. Okay. How many times have you filled out an application where they ask for an address? Probably in the last week, like four times. Yeah. Just in the last week alone. So let's probably more than that, actually, like probably more than that. Yeah. Probably if I think about when I've got things shipped to me, probably in the last month, like 50 times, at least. Yeah. Every time you fill in the shipping column, that's you need an address to do that. Right. And I personally haven't seen this too often, but I'm sure we have all seen a form that says, do not put a PO box. Right. Yeah. And I think those forms are typically, what is a form that that would say that? I think maybe a driver's license. Well, even even some companies won't ship to a PO box. Yeah, exactly. So let's just think about this. You are currently homeless. How do you stop being homeless? Well, I guess you could, if you're assuming you have some money, I guess you could rent a cheap apartment. It's hard to find a cheap apartment that's like safe and not disgusting. To begin with, even like in the first place. But let's let's say this is a thought experiment. Let's say you find a cheap apartment and you have the money. On the application to two apartments, they will ask you for previous residents. Almost always. They'll ask you for previous residents. I don't know why they ask you. I don't know why they need five years of your residence history and not just like literally the place you lived in before. They need, sometimes they ask for five years of them. It's because to check if you're a stable person, because if you have lived in ten different places over the last two years, that's an indication to the rent tour, the sort of the leasing agent, right, that you might not be a good candidate, which is like the sort of is this vicious cycle because if you have housing instability, it can make it harder for you to then get into housing because people will see you as being risky. Yeah. This is the cash 22 that if you're designing a board game, you want to avoid. You have no housing, but the fact that you have no housing will make it harder for you to find housing because on rental applicant's application or renting applications, they always ask for previous residents. And if you can't provide a good stable history, they might reject you. So that's one thing of why having an address is important because you literally, sometimes you literally can't find housing if you don't have a previous address. Another thing, let's say you're homeless, what is a way to get out of being homeless? Well, you need a job. I'm pretty sure all job applications, they ask you where you live. And I'm pretty sure they also say, don't put a PO box. Yeah, job applications, they want to know where you live currently. They want to know, like, are you nearby? But it can also be an indicator for them about stability and whether they can see you as a consistent and reliable employee. Yeah. So again, the cash 22 comes back again in order for you to escape homelessness, you need to have an address, you need to have a home. And that's sort of the game that we're playing when it comes to housing policies in the United States. Another thing that you might need to remedy your homeless situation is maybe you need to open a bank account. I'm pretty sure they also ask you where you live when you open a bank account. They because they need to know if you overdraft your account where they can send letters to make sure that you pay the money back that you overspent on your account or if checks get canceled or they just need to send you paperwork on your account, they need to know where to send it. Yeah, exactly. And let's say you need government ID. So because you need to, in order to apply for a lot of stuff, you need a driver's license, you need some sort of official document. If you don't have an address, it's pretty much impossible for you to acquire those documents. And I don't think you could use a PO box to get your driver's license. I don't think that's the case. I could be wrong. But whether that is true or not, the fact that you don't have an address makes getting those official government documents very difficult. And another thing. So you can see where the trend is. Let's say you're homeless. Let's say you need some sort of benefits. Whether it's food stamps, whether it's welfare, whether it's whatever. You need something to help you get you going, get you off the ground. If you don't have an address, you cannot apply for food stamps. If you don't have an address, you cannot apply to pretty much any sort of government benefits that might help you in your situation. So I was just looking up really quick because we keep talking about a PO box as an alternative way to receive mail. But I was just doing a quick look up. It looks like you need ID, so you need government ID to be able to get a PO box. And it appears that you need a physical address, even beyond that. You have to fill out contact information in order to be able to get the PO box. So like, anyway, I just thought that I was like, wait, what does it actually take to get a PO box? What do you need? You may actually need a physical address to even be able to get a PO box, so just. So in order for you to have an alternative to being homeless, you need to have a home. So it says you need to enter your contact and billing information to reserve a PO box. And billing information includes an address. It's a good address, yeah. So you can see the theme that I'm trying to push here. It is a vicious cycle. And if anyone were to design this as a board game, it would get rejected by every game publisher because they would look at it and be like, this is not a balanced game. This is a game where if you lose a little bit, you pretty much lost the whole thing. It's just a vicious cycle. And you never want to put players in a situation where they could lose a little bit in the beginning and they can't make a comeback because then white bother playing out the rest of the game. So many things in our life, if you want to be able to function normally requires a physical address. And not just like your friend's house, but I think a lot of times, if they bother checking, it needs to be something that the place that you actually live in. Well, I was thinking about something as you were talking about sort of the different things that an address requires. I think even if you have an address and you move, right, you have to remember. To update all of these things. And so people can continue sending mail or information to a prior address. And if you have an updated that, that can lead to issues also. So if you are very housing insecure where you may be staying at different people's houses and then mail is being sent to a place where you aren't there anymore, let's say it's a bill. And then you don't pay it because you're no longer there because you're having to move from place to place. And now you're sent to collections and, you know, it's just not having stable housing can impact so many aspects of your life. And keep in mind that in this thought experiment, first of all, some people live through this situation, but in this experiment, thought experiment that we're playing out, your immediate needs are taken care of. You are not starving. You are not dying for water. You are not at the mercy of the element. This is simply the fact that all your needs are taken care of, but you simply don't have an address. And this is the type of problems that you will face by simply not having an address. And we haven't even gone to, like, actual shelter listness. Yeah, I hadn't thought about how many aspects of our life are impacted by whether or not you have an address, things you-- It's not even where you live just having an address. Yeah, I mean, I take for granted that when I fill out a form, I fill out the same address. We just celebrated the five-year anniversary of living in this particular house. And-- Well, when I was younger, I moved every year for 11 years, which was for school and for different things. But that was-- Yeah. It was hard to stay on top of, and it's nice to have a stable place to be. And I think so many folks hit that for granted and don't realize the implications of not having stable housing. Exactly. Yeah. If you don't have an address, it makes it harder for you to find a job. It makes it harder for you to apply for assistance. It makes it harder for you to open a bank account. It makes it harder for you to find other housing. And this is what many people will call the vicious cycle. And this is what is so unbalanced about the system that we're currently in. And how does that impact your health? Because it's a public health podcast after all. How does all those things impact your health? Well, if you have these issues, you're probably not going to have a stable source of healthy foods. You're probably not going to have a stable source of income. And as we know, poverty is very detrimental on people's health and well-being. So in terms of solution, well, it's very hard to come up with solutions for an issue as big as this. I can't even wrap my head around like how would I even approach this? So one issue is supply and demand, so it can be very hard to find available low-cost but high-quality housing. There's just housing is not available, even if you have resources, it's either too expensive because the supply is low and the demand is so high. Or what you can afford is exposing you potentially to environmental harms, which we can talk about in other episodes. For sure, and even with the supply and demand issue fixed, it's going to be like the whole issue of in order to have good housing, you need to have a history of stable housing. And if you have a history of unstable housing, you're going to have an issue to find new housing, even if you have the resource. And I'm struggling to come up with what sort of solutions we have against that. Because it's not like we can mandate landlords to be like, okay, you can't check housing history. That seems a little. Right, because the landlord or the building manager, they could be taking a risk of having someone come into the space and so they want to know, you know, have you had a stable job, what's your credit history, do you pay your bills on time, where have you been living over the last few years, whether, you know, did you dip out on your rent or anything like that, it's important for them to know. But I feel like we're missing an opportunity to help people, whether they are returning citizens from, you know, having spent time incarcerated, or if it's just people who are trying to establish themselves, like we need to have something in place to provide a better safety net for these individuals, for lack of a better word, some kind of support system that the government can put into place to say, you know, we are going to assume some of the risk for the individuals in the short term, so that they can begin to establish a stable housing history over the longer term, so that they can then be able to get into whatever other housing they might need. Yeah, so I mean, housing like this, with all housing issue, the solution is going to be very big. It's going to be hard to think about and comprehend even what a solution on that scale would be, and this is only the first of many episodes that we're going to do on housing as public health, because housing truly is a massive public health issue, especially in this country. Well, I think we can also bring this back to local elections. Everything goes back to local elections. Right, so where things get zoned, what gets approved, what kind of housing is approved, whether it's affordable, or if it's, you know, designed for profit, right, like what kinds of housing developments are being approved by the city council, the permit office, whatever it can be, you know, designers, developers are submitting their designs, and then someone's reviewing and approving them, and so cities could take a greater role in ensuring that at least some portion of that housing stock that's being developed is set aside for individuals who maybe have a lower income. I wanted to begin this series by simply stating how much of our lives is dependent on the physical address, but this is just a first of many episode in the housing series. And for one of our future housing as public health episodes, we will definitely discuss just how much one neighborhood you live in impacts your health. Thank you all so much for listening to this episode of Everything is Public Health. If you like the show, subscribe, and spread the word so that more people can learn about public health. Follow us on Twitter @everythingisph to stay up to date on new episodes, public health news, and more. Send us questions or comments to everything is public health at gmail.com, also reach out if you can be missed an important perspective, or suggest a future topic. Please also take a moment to rate and review on Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to your podcasts. It does help us immensely. Don't forget to like, share, and comment as well. 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