I have been conducting community-based research on HIV prevention and access to treatment and care for over 20 years, most of this with my community research partner, Jury Candelario who is Division Director of APAIT/Special Service for Groups. Jury and APAIT/SSG have been building their portfolio on bridge/transitional housing over the past decade as we have observed the ways in which unstable housing and being unhoused substantially affects physical and mental health and the programs that are delivered to improve health. See below for a news highlight from the opening of Casa de Zulma, a bridge housing project that targets transgender women in Los Angeles.
Researchers have highlighted the ways in which involuntary mobility (people being forced to move) has affected health outcomes. Ricky Bluthenthal at USC Keck School of Medicine gave a really inspiring and informative talk at the UCLA Grand Rounds recently where he identified unstable housing/shelter as important for addressing substance use. He showed compelling data that demonstrated that the more people had to move, the worse off they were in terms of health outcomes. See Table 2 below from Chiang, J. C., Bluthenthal, R. N., Wenger, L. D., Auerswald, C. L., Henwood, B. F., & Kral, A. H. (2022). Health risk associated with residential relocation among people who inject drugs in Los Angeles and San Francisco, CA: a cross sectional study. BMC Public Health, 22(1), 823, available at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12889-022-13227-4.
Researchers and foundations have long recognized the general link between housing and health; for example, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has argued the vital role of housing for over a decade. What is less clear, however, is how we can measure or show the size of effects of stable (or unstable) housing on health outcomes; in other words, how much does stable housing contribute to specific health outcomes? To address this gap in knowledge, Jury Candelario and I with a stellar team of researchers and activists have recently been awarded a grant from the California HIV Research Program to examine the role of stable housing in preventing HIV and in supporting HIV/AIDS treatment and care with a focus on transgender women in Southern California. We hope that this project, from 2023-2027, will help us analyze the specific role of stable temporary housing on HIV outcomes. Stay tuned for results from this study!
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