Pediatrician emphasizes housing’s link to health

Afew years ago, Dr. Megan Sandel treated a child at Boston Medical Center’s Grow Clinic, where Sandel is associate director.

The child was 2 years old but the size of a 1-year-old.

“We tried everything — PediaSure, medications, scopes,” Sandel said. “Nothing worked.”

The case was worrisome because, as Sandel noted, “if you’re not growing your body during that critical time period, you’re not growing your brain.”

Suddenly, miraculously, the child began to grow. Sandel’s team could find only one reason for the transformation: The child’s mother had received a housing voucher that allowed her to move off a relative’s couch into a home.

Sandel shares the story to illustrate the importance of housing on health, a connection she has devoted much of her career to exploring and helping solve.

“There is no greater predictor of health than where you live,” said Sandel, who on April 10 will bring her message to Columbus as the opening speaker at the Housing Ohio 2017 conference.

In some ways, the connection between housing and health is obvious. There is a clear link, for example, between indoor air quality and asthma.

But often, the connection isn’t so clear.

Sandel believes the 2-year-old, for example, started growing because stable housing provided him comfort, in addition to a good night’s sleep.

“This kid now had a bed to sleep in,” she said. “His mom, who was depressed with her situation, now had the energy to live up to her potential as the mother.”

Poor housing often is accompanied by stress, minimal economic opportunity, exposure to violence, lack of access to green space and health care, and vulnerability to health threats such as bad air, pests and disease.

This isn’t strictly a money issue. Sandel pointed out that frequent moving can seriously dampen academic achievement across incomes.

“If you move at least three times between Dr. Sandel

the first and sixth grade, you score 20 points lower on reading scores,”

she noted.

There are solutions, although most, such as housing vouchers, cost money. But Sandel is encouraged by alternative efforts to address the problem. At a recent conference in Boston, where I saw Sandel speak, she singled out Nationwide Children’s Hospital’s work to improve the neighborhood around its East Livingston Avenue campus.

For Sandel, central to the challenge is understanding that housing is more than shelter.

“It’s part of why I use the word instead

of housing. Home evokes an emotion that is very powerful,” Sandel said.

“Stress itself isn’t toxic,” she said. “What’s toxic is when it’s perpetual. You need to put your feet up at night and rest and breathe clean air and not worry about gunshots and dial back. Many who have a home that is an oasis have a hard time understanding how awful it is for those who don’t.

“That’s what makes you sick — the chronic toxicity of that stress,” she said. “That’s why home is so powerful.”