Housing & Health Equity Initiative

The field of community development is rich with connections between affordable, stable housing and improved health outcomes.
The Housing & Health Equity (H&HE) Initiative promotes systemic connections that expand, sustain, and enhance innovation and practice.

Additional H&HE Resources:

Improving Health Outcomes

Since 1996, Greater Minnesota Housing Fund (GMHF) has worked to improve health outcomes through investments in affordable housing production and preservation. Stable housing is a foundational social determinant of health (SDOH) which helps build stronger and healthier individuals, families, and communities. GMHF knows the key ingredient for well-being starts with a place to call home.

GMHF believes that every unit of housing – that provides stability for a family – provides a platform for better health, education, employment, and income – all of which are critical SDOH factors.

Of the nearly 20,000 homes preserved or created since GMHF’s inception approximately 20% of units provide permanent supportive housing or housing with services. GMHF has partnered with hospitals, clinics, and healthcare companies across Minnesota, including Sanford, Mayo Clinic and United Health, to improve community health through housing production.

H&HE Investment Benefits

Initiative Goals

The Housing & Health Equity (H&HE) Initiative promotes systemic connections which expand, sustain, and enhance innovation and practice around the most critical social determinant of health, the place we call home.

Goals Include:

• Engage Healthcare Partners:
  Engage key healthcare institutions to advance goals around decreasing racial disparities and improving community health through coordinated investment in affordable housing
• Pipeline of Projects:
  Bridge the healthcare and housing sectors to create a pipeline of innovative projects, programs, or strategies for improved community health through GMHF’s core activities of financing the continuum of affordable housing.
• Research & Data:
  Identify and assemble research, best practices and data tools to advance the collective understanding of the positive impacts of housing and health equity connections.
• Catalyze Investment:
  Align and coordinate investment resources. Explore capital sources and uses for housing and health equity solutions in emergent project opportunities related to social determinants of health.
• Policy & Systems Change:
  Identify learning and solutions to advocate with partners on appropriate policy and systems change opportunities that will effectively link housing and health.

In partnership with healthcare and housing leaders, GMHF will foster partnerships and coordinated investment to achieve shared outcomes around healthy housing and healthy communities.

Learn More about the Housing & Health Equity Framework