What am I Reading? The Role of Housing for Health in an Era of Environmental Change
What am I Reading? The Role of Housing for Health in an Era of Environmental Change
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Post written by Alex Mikulas, PhD, University of Colorado-Boulder
Introduction
Housing is an important protective force and has important impacts on health and wellbeing , especially during rapid environmental change and disasters. Due to the health, economic, and social vulnerabilities of aging adults, housing may serve an especially important role in shaping their health and wellbeing. In both research and policy settings, it is critical to identify how several social and material features of housing shape health risks and outcomes for aging adults before, during, and after environmental change and disasters.
From housing to health
One framework outlined by health and housing scholars Carloyn Swope and Diana Hernández identifies four features of housing that impact health outcomes(2019). Housing conditions are the characteristics of a home itself that shape health and wellbeing directly – such as the protective power of air conditioning or the danger of mold exposure. Housing consistency is the long- and short-term experiences of housing that have major health implications over time, such as residential instability, crowding, or chronic homelessness. Housing costs are household financial aspects of housing. These include factors beyond affordability, such as how mortgage status or tenant protections may impact economic well-being after a job loss or weathering a medical emergency. Finally, the larger housing context – a home’s neighborhood characteristics and physical location – shapes access to health and emergency services, and important local amenities.
Health scholars Jennifer Molinsky and Anne Forsyth introduce timing as another important consideration for how housing shapes climaterelated health risks (2023). Even before a disaster or acute environmental change, housing shapes who is at higher risk of exposure. During an event, housing influences how sensitive someone might be by providing varying degrees of shelter and protection from immediate danger.
Finally, after disaster, housing shapes the recovery and resiliency of residents, serving as an economic asset, or as a financial liability. In an era of increasing environmental change and disasters, a comprehensive conceptual approach to housing – its layered dimensions and their timing – is necessary for addressing the health needs of aging adults.
Aging adults, housing, and health before, during, and after disaster
The three examples below use these frameworks to illustrate how different features of housing influence health and wellbeing, particularly for aging adults.
The housing market shapes the risk of exposure to environmental change and disasters before they occur
The housing market is a primary force in shaping vulnerability to future disasters and environmental change by placing people into more or less risky locations. Take renters and rental markets, for example. In urban landscapes, affordable rental housing options are more likely to be located in high climate-risk areas of cities, and this pattern is expected to increase (Buchanan et al. 2020; JCHS 2022). Because lower income renters have fewer options for affordable housing in low-risk locations and limited economic resources to relocate, the limits of the rental market structure low-income and other disadvantaged populations in higher-risk areas.
For homeowners, another pattern is emerging. Due to social change and emerging risk disclosure policies, home buyers have a growing awareness of climate risk and are altering their mobility and purchasing decisions. Home prices and prized residential locations are now partly determined by their resilience to disasters and environmental risks in a process called climate gentrification (Thompson et al. 2023). At the same time, high-risk regions are among the fastest growing on the United States, driven in large part by retirees moving to warmer areas (Schuetz 2024). More broadly, some researchers believe that many homes are overvalued due to the potential risk of climate-related market changes (Gourevitch et al. 2023; Gourevitch and Kousky 2025). Federal mortgage buyout programs exist to help residents relocate from high-risk areas, but the programs are unevenly applied across states and social groups (Shi et al. 2022). More research is needed to determine if patterns of weather-related migration will begin to place “climate handcuffs” on aging adults wishing to sell homes in high-risk or less desirable places.
Finally, as discussed in a CACHE post by Jenna Tipaldo, those who wish to age in their longstanding residence are often doing so in areas at greater risk to wildfire and other disasters (Winkler and Mockrin 2025). Personal preference for aging in place, as well as constraints imposed by the difficulty in selling homes in risky locations, means that populations are aging faster and clustering in high-risk locations compared to lower-risk places. The market and social features of housing – cost, changing preferences, and the desire to age in place – are stratifying the risk of environmental change and disaster by both age and socioeconomic status.
During a disaster, physical shelters shape the experience and severity of environmental change and disasters
Housing characteristics and materials – the sheltering capacity of a home – are critically important for shaping the immediate health impact of a disaster or environmental change. Take, for example, the importance of home heating and cooling during extreme temperatures. A Toronto-based research team found that during periods of extreme heat, living in a nursing home with air conditioning lowered the risk of death compared to living in a nursing home without air conditioning (Katz et al. 2025). Other studies find similar evidence for the protective capacity of air conditioning during extreme heat (Sera et al. 2020).
On the opposite end of the spectrum, old or sub-standard housing stock is inefficient, difficult, and expensive to heat during extreme cold. For example, mobile homes are at greater risk of disaster and have minimal sheltering capabilities compared to other structures (Rumbach, Sullivan, and Makarewicz 2020). Meeting energy costs (Hernández 2013) and the disruption of utility services (Peterson et al. 2024) are growing concerns as energy costs increase and as energy grids are tested during extreme temperatures. In a poignant illustration of the basic importance of housing as shelter, one CACHE demonstration project details how deaths of vulnerable – likely unhoused – New York City residents increase on days with extreme heat.
Ultimately, because older populations are much more physiologically vulnerable to environmental conditions, and only slightly more likely to seek shelter outside the home when disaster strikes (Behr and Diaz 2013; Malik et al. 2018), the sheltering capacity of their homes is paramount as disasters and extreme weather become more common (Smith and Swacina 2017). And yet, the physical limitations and fixed incomes of many aging adults present challenges to retrofitting existing homes with new, climate resilient features like air conditioning, water filtration, and fire mitigation (Forsyth and Molinsky 2021).
After change and disaster, the economics of housing shape recovery and adaptability
Finally, for homeowners, disasters can often result in the loss of their largest economic assets (Tagtachian and Balk 2023). Homes are often under-insured or have no coverage at all for increasingly common disasters like wildfires or floods. Rising insurance premiums make formal protection out of reach for many. Also, disasters can result in a cascadeof economic and health risks if households do not have sufficient coverage or independent wealth to rebuild or start anew (Rhodes and Besbris 2022).
Take for example, the 2024 Hurricane Helene flooding in North Carolina. Flooding damaged ordestroyed mortgaged homes, resulting in homeowners being responsible for payments on unusable assets. In many cases, these households relocated to substandard temporary housing that is vulnerable to the elements, or they continued to live in their flood-damaged homes. Such housing conditions increase health risks related to extreme temperature, toxic debris and mold exposure, and substandard living conditions (Albert 2026). The situation is similar in the immediate wake of the 2025 Los Angeles urban wildfires (Borunda 2026; Copley 2026). Because impacted households may be unable to sell damaged or lost homes at reasonable prices, they may divert any financial resources away from health-promotion and towards rent or repair efforts, all while covering outstanding mortgages.
As for renters, inattentive or predatory landlords may neglect to make their housing units climate resilient and delay timely repairs after a disaster. Many renters lack formal protections against such negligence, and against evictions and rent hikes in the aftermath of disasters (Lee and Van Zandt 2019). Often, disaster or rapid environmental change displaces renter households across town or across the country. Sudden or extreme changes in housing circumstances have extensive health impacts due to healthcare disruptions, loss of community and social support, extreme stress and mental health challenges, and more (Fussell and Lowe 2014; Tapsell and Tunstall 2008). There are greater impacts of displacement on aging populations (McDermott et al. 2019; Prohaska and Peters 2019).
Final remarks
The complex and layered features of housing – from market forces and financial relationships to the structure’s characteristics and location – shape health and wellbeing before, during, and after environmental change and disasters. Because of aging people’s additional vulnerabilities in health, mobility, and finances, housing is and will remain a crucial element for how they weather a changing and more disaster-prone future. Researchers and policy makers should focus attention on particular and relevant features of housing and health, and their occurrence along the timeline of environmental change and disasters. Such efforts will help uncover unknown risks and possible adaptive solutions to better support and protect the growing and increasingly climate-vulnerable aging population.
Additional conceptual resources
- Housing and health – (Meltzer and Schwartz 2016; Taylor 2018)
- Climate gentrification – (Thompson et al. 2023)
- Aging in place – (Forsyth and Molinsky 2021)
- Rebuilding homes after disaster – (Rhodes and Besbris 2022)
- NPR and NYT coverage of emerging impacts of Hurricane Helene and the Los Angeles urban wildfires – (Albert 2026; Borunda 2026; Copley 2026; Kaysen 2025)
References