Dear friend of CIFAR,

I’ve searched the world to learn how housing can contribute to the success of a society. In the end, my quest took me to Toronto’s Regent Park, one of Canada’s oldest and largest public housing developments.

This once idealistic housing complex has been troubled for decades by crime and health issues, and is now being redeveloped. Regent Park provides me with a rare, real-life laboratory through which I am learning surprising things about the relationship between housing and health.

Having control over one’s own home provides health benefits that we are only now beginning to understand. Affordable housing, I’ve learned, does much more than provide shelter from the elements – it improves the state of people’s bodies and minds, and affects how individuals, and entire societies, succeed.

Changing Regent Park into a mixed-income, mixed land use community helps us assess a wide range of factors influencing healthy urban housing. The redevelopment is intended to set new standards for the design of socially mixed neighbourhoods. There is a concentrated effort to make a difference in aspects that we have already identified as attributes of housing that may affect health.

The key ingredients for a healthy home seem to be; access to permanent housing at an affordable rent, housing that’s not too concentrated; and having a high degree of control over how the individual space is decorated and furnished. Our homes, after all, are a reflection of who we are.

The effects of growing up in poor quality housing cast a long shadow into the future. Not having a place to call one’s own greatly influences the quality of social relationships and mental health. There is also a clear association between childhood housing conditions and mental well-being in adulthood.

Having better or poorer housing and neighbourhoods affects us all. These patterns of inequality, and their direct imprint on our health, highlight that housing is a critical issue. A healthy society depends on understanding what makes housing functional. Everything in my studies suggest making housing research a priority will have benefits that go far beyond the bounds of projects such as Regent Park.

Best wishes from the frontiers of human knowledge.

James Dunn
Fellow, Successful Societies program
Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
____________________________________