The greatest form of love is healthy, safe, and thriving communities, achieved first through housing security. The best way to ensure that is to secure adequate, safe, and affordable housing for all.

At its core, health care is about helping people live healthy lives. Clinical care is only one piece of the puzzle, however. Research shows that medical services contribute some 10 percent to overall health outcomes. Whereas genetics account for another 30 percent, 40 percent comes from behaviors such as diet, exercise, and substance use. The remaining 20 percent arises from social and environmental conditions. These “social determinants of health,” which include our jobs, neighborhoods, access to food, education, and community support, shape our well-being to a greater extent than our work inside clinics and hospitals. Among these social determinants of health, housing is foundational.

Without safe, stable housing, the rest falls apart. Housing is the literal and figurative basis of health: a place to sleep, store food and medicine, recover from illness, and feel safe. Without stable housing, it is difficult to prioritize or receive health care. Families and individuals without it face cascading challenges that no amount of clinical care can solve.

Moving Towards Housing Security: The Weight of Housing Costs

For decades, Americans have faced a growing gap between incomes and housing costs. Families that spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent are considered “rent burdened.” Today, nearly half of US households fall into that category, and more than one-quarter spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing (“severe rent burden”). Many of these families are forced to make impossible choices: rent or food, rent or medicine, rent or transportation to work.

The math is unforgiving. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the United States faces a shortage of 7.1 million affordable and available rental homes for extremely low-income households. For each 100 such families, only 35 units exist. No state in the country has an adequate housing supply, and there is no city where someone working full time at the federal minimum wage can afford a modest two-bedroom apartment. This is not an urban or coastal crisis but a national one, encompassing everything from rural towns to major cities, and it is getting worse.

Read the full article about housing as health care by Marc Dones and Margot Kushel at Stanford Social Innovation Review.