Introduction
There is considerable agreement in the health and public health professions that housing and its quality are among basic social determinants of health and well-being (Bentley et al, 2025). Housing availability, affordability, durability, quality, and usability form a critical nexus in improving people’s quality of life, particularly of those groups experiencing marginalization across the globe (Streimikiene, 2015). Images of ramshackle housing or make shift housing and, of course, no housing, are prevalent across the globe, begging for solutions ranging from sound housing for all to housing as a human right. Article 25 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights identifies housing as essential to standard of living (United Nations General Assembly, 1948). In its Article 11, The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR, 1991) complements Article 25 of the UDHR.
Unfortunately, housing as a human right gains little traction in most nations. Constitutional guarantees of housing for all are few in number, with South Africa, Spain, Mexico, Russia, Belgium, Venezuela, Portugal, Finland, and Ecuador standing out as having constitutional provisions that speak to housing as a right. In Section 26 of its constitution, South Africa, for example, recognizes the right to adequate housing and requires the state to enact legislation that promotes this right. Several of these countries intertwine housing and health within their constitutions, such as Spain which declares in its Spanish Housing Act that people have a right to “decent and adequate housing that creates the necessary conditions of health.” In Section 19 of Finland’s constitution, there is an explicit linkage between health rights and housing underscoring that it is the responsibility of the state to “promote the right of everyone the opportunity to arrange their own housing” so people can experience dignity. However, there are considerable disparities in housing adequacy across the globe, particularly among emerging economies (World Bank Group, 2021), making the call for dignity more assertion than real. .
But it is important to underscore dignity here since this is a fundamental value of the social work profession. Given the importance of housing to well-being, it is easy to argue that the provision of housing, and not just shelter, is a fundamental right, and an essential requirement of life, given its effects on social development, individual and group well-being, psychological well-being, health and public health, and inclusion.
Housing as a System
Housing provides more than shelter. It is a central component of community infrastructure offering a place in which a person, group, or family can find safety and protection, not only from the elements but also in the provision of privacy, solidarity, solitude, and social interaction among those who occupy housing. Housing is connected to home life in which people can obtain affirmation, support, and affection. Increasingly, homes are the site of health care, both formal and informal, education, and the transmittal of culture. Although we may consider housing as a physical structure, home life suggests psychological connections for belonging.
Housing and Social Involvement
The recognition of housing as a staging platform for social involvement and even social inclusion holds importance since housing is likely interconnected with social support, interactions with others, and the formation of social networks. The location of housing and its siting contribute to social interactions. Housing units may cluster together thereby facilitating mutual support, particularly within intergenerational networks through which housing contributes to care across the generations. Such clustering may increasingly hold importance to both child and elder care. The location of housing can influence visitation patterns and sociability among multiple occupants of housing units. Housing and its location serve as an opportunity structure linking households to broader social benefits, like employment and health care. As people move further away in search of affordable housing, they jeopardize their connections to local social institutions that provide such benefits (Hochstenbach et al, 2025).
Housing and Public Health Infrastructure
Housing is part of a community’s public health infrastructure involving its linkages to waste removal in various ways, interlacing of housing with energy systems and use, and linkages to transportation, physical mobility, and movement within neighborhoods and within greater areas of community life. The devolution of energy systems, in particular, can make housing increasingly independent of large utilities. The devolution of energy provision at the neighborhood level is making whole neighborhoods independent and self-sufficient. Innovations in cable, satellite, and infrared systems are making internet services more affordable and accessible to households even in rural and remote areas fostering possibilities for home-based telehealth. The house as a critical component of a larger public health system is gaining value and its quality is a social determinant of health (Bentley et al, 2025).
Housing and Street Infrastructure
Housing implicates structures of streets and their capacities to manage water, waste removal, mobility, and walkability, serving as essential infrastructure. Streets are particularly important in facilitating use of education, access to commercial and retail outlets, as well as social involvement in political and economic life of a community. Housing may occur in differing densities with some housing situated in vertical structures co-located with the availability of retail and commercial opportunities located with housing. Other housing options may be situated on streets with low densities isolating them from resources within a given community. Density and co-location of housing units can influence the frequency of social interactions considerably.
Good Housing in the Face of Real Challenges
Affordability and availability of housing is a challenge within most communities across the globe (World Bank Group, 2021). Housing policies that increasingly involve market driven reforms in which the construction and allocation of housing are controlled by competitive market forces that influence who can afford and obtain housing. This introduces a cost factor in which people in search of housing must take on considerable burden not only in entering housing, but in keeping the housing they get (Zhan, He, et al, 2026).. Mediating structures, such as lenders and banks, control access to housing, determining its affordability. Evidence indicates that across too many countries people in search of adequate housing are moving further from their work places and schools in search of affordable housing thereby exacerbating inequalities (Hochstenbach et al, 2025). Escalating construction costs may reflect investments in expansion of square footage beyond what is needed and installations, like multiple bathrooms, that further induce inequalities between those who can and cannot afford housing.
Alternative organizational arrangements in facilitating housing for people of limited means can introduce social innovations involving collective ownership, risk management, and management of housing options as an asset. Such alternative arrangements, such as those that nongovernmental associations (as opposed to businesses) can employ, may become increasingly important in the production of housing when those associations bear collective risk of expanding, providing and sustaining good housing.
The literature underscores the importance of housing as a social determinant of health and well-being as well as an equity factor in health promotion. But poor households shoulder what can be an overwhelming cost burden. Communities must address this burden if it is to make housing a social utility in which it is widely available and affordable for even those families or individuals with limited if no means. Currently there is a crisis in cost burden, weighing heavily on those households in which housing costs consume an excessive proportion of a household budget. Using mechanisms to foster stable housing for individuals and families gain immediate importance when social work considers the principal aim of housing—the protection of the health and well-being of inhabitants and their inclusion in community life.
The location, siting and construction of housing as well as the resilience of housing units become even more important in the face of climate change. Rapid shifts in weather patterns, temperature, and massive disruptive events heightening housing vulnerability and sustainability, such fast moving events like fire and floods as well as slow moving ones like drought, require insightful planning of housing units. An impending crisis facing numerous communities across the globe is the availability of potable water and water systems for the distribution of what is rapidly becoming a principal scarce resource. Here again, housing policy must grapple with housing access and affordability within a whole systems framework. Housing cannot be isolated from other systems designed to support livability. Treating housing as a singular unit for individuals or families overlooks how housing occurs within systems that extend the footprint of housing deeply into natural ecosystems and into human communities.
Good housing will recognize the ecology in which housing occurs and is situated, requiring not only considerable human ingenuity in housing policy, but also in the construction and maintenance of housing as a social asset central to the common good. Social work as a profession has much to contribute not only to the planning of housing options, but in facilitating the affordability, availability, accessibility, and sustainability of housing options, particularly for those who are in search of housing, but who possess limited incomes, and deserve protection from excessive housing costs.
This potential inequity, the one created by excessive housing costs (not only inclusive of entry but also including monthly rents or mortgages, interest, insurance, property taxes and fees, and maintenance), housing access operating within markets begs for alternatives involving the socialization of such costs. Such socialization of costs likely means that some organization or level of government must take on risk in guaranteeing housing as a social utility (i.e. housing for all) when government recognizes the necessity of housing as part of a system of public health and even as an entitlement. This recognition embraces housing as a social determinant of health and well-being. Housing as a social determinant of health trumps the profitability of housing.
Good housing will be resilient in the face of increasingly challenging dynamics of climate change (Toll, et al, 2025). It must be increasingly available to those of moderate or limited incomes and to those without income. Good housing for these priority populations will operate outside of competitive markets that only serve to ration housing. Good housing offers sites and locations that protect housing as an asset and offer protection from climate change. And good housing recognizes how housing itself is a social utility operating as essential to the realization of the public or common good, particularly in its linkages to other social benefits at street, neighborhood and larger community levels. As suggested by the constitutions I offer at the beginning of this paper, housing constitutes a human right, and its denial and its rationing are violations of these rights.
Given the complexity of good housing and its provision, communities and their members should expect increasingly higher levels of governmental responsiveness, including public ingenuity, in making good housing available and in sustaining it. Responsive government at multiple levels, globally, nationally, regionally, and locally is essential in fostering social responsibility for the advancement of good housing.
Housing-Focused Social Work
Housing policy that guarantees good housing is a fulcrum in which housing focused social work will turn. Consistent with my own definition of advocacy, that social work advocacy elevates the status of people whose status has been diminished, people without housing or who face very real barriers to the entry of housing should be able to make claims on government for good housing. Even with constitutional guarantees of housing, housing policy globally remains moribund by the absence of social innovation. Social work as an international profession can make a significant impact in advancing good housing, mindful that such housing is consistent with the international values of the profession, and in recognizing the centrality of housing to the realization of equity.
The advancement of good housing options through community-based associations supporting affordability in housing and in helping people keep their housing is a timely innovation needed now more than ever. Assumption of risk and liability is a core competency of such associations as is the competencies in maintaining housing, offering access to maintenance at the household level, and in the provision of amenities and social services in fostering housing success. Recognizing the complexity of total housing management, these associations can be free standing within a given locale, or they can involve consortia arrangements in which organizations like universities, technical schools, trade unions, nongovernmental social services agencies, family service agencies, and community action organizations collaborate in the founding and administration of housing associations. Still these associations may adopt governing structures as local public corporations.
Such associations can acquire spent housing or buildings for restoration or repurposing, take on financing in the building of multi housing developments, and collaborate with commercial builders, especially small local ones, in construction. Whether free standing or consortia, operating either as public or nongovernmental entities, the associations stand for provision of housing options for those whose housing needs are unmet in competitive markets and whose cost burden is simply unreasonable or exploitive.
Yet another core competence of such associations involves working at household levels in facilitating housing success of residents. Some householders, particularly those who are inexperienced in housing maintenance, may simply lack skills in maintaining their housing, and may be easily exploited by housing trades in making household repairs or installations, such as heating and cooling systems, waste disposable, or roofing. An association can offer such support either in providing maintenance personnel working for the association or in offering a list of preferred providers of maintenance services. For those households in which members can easily experience social isolation, an association can provide outreach, friendly visiting, and social events bringing residents together for celebration, socialization, and community service.
Total housing management does not mean control of householders. Indeed, the governmental certification of an association can involve residents as members who govern the association, serve as advisors, offer feedback about the association’s performance, and evaluate the effectiveness of the association. Membership is an important model of fostering participation and involvement in association governance, consistent with social work’s traditions of group work.
Associations can further their responsiveness in assisting those who can benefit from housing assistance in its multiple forms through the addition of four competencies indicative of effective social services. These involve a no wrong door policy helping anyone entering the organization with person-centered assistance, zero reject, meaning that all comers receive assistance in meeting their housing needs and with those challenges influencing housing success, wrap around in offering a full spectrum of assistance in fostering housing success, and cultural responsiveness in meeting the preferences of diverse groups. Housing success in this scheme means that the association can form a value chain moving from housing availability to access, to holding on to housing, and enjoying housing.
What is the financing strategy for such associations? There are seven possibilities among others: (1) place a millage on high income households whose housing value exceeds a certain threshold, (2) a national progressive housing tax, (3) a mandatory annual contribution by high income construction companies offering premium housing, particularly in climate compromised locations, (4) a sin tax for consumption of alcohol or legal drug use, such as marijuana, (5) grants, contracts, or financing mechanisms multiple levels of government would provide, (6) advancing tax rates on high profit technology companies, and (7) increasing revenue for housing associations through sovereignty funds. A national trust, similar to the Highway Trust Fund in the United States, could administer these funds offering financial support for housing development undertaken by associations.
Social workers are likely witnesses to the housing crises unfolding in their communities. It is now time for the profession to invest our considerable ingenuity for social innovation in addressing a serious inequity inherent in the housing crisis.
References
Bentley, R, Mason, K.., Jacobs, D. et al (2025). Housing as a determinant of health 1. Housing as a social determinant of health: a contemporary framework. Lancet Public Health, 10, e855-864.
Hochstenbach, C., Kadi, J., Maalsen, S., & Nethercote, M. (2025). Housing as an engine of inequality and the role of policy. International Journal of Housing Policy, 25(1) 1.17.
CESCR (1991). General COMMENT NO. 4: The right to adequate housing (Art. 11 (1) of the Covenant. United Nations Human Rights Treaty Bodies.
United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948.
Streimikiene, D. (2015). Quality of life and housing International Journal of Information and Educational Technology, 5(2), 140-145.
Toll, A, Chapman, R, Howden-Chapman, P. et al (2025). Housing at the intersection of health and climate change. Lancet Public Health, 10, e865-873.
World Bank Group, Introducing the Adequate Housing Index. November, 2021,
Zhan, D., He, Y., Wang D., & Wang, Z. (2026). The impact of housing cost burden on self-rated health among urban reenters in China. Science Reports, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-60742-0