Health, Housing, and Energy Disparities by Neighborhood: Improving the Health and Homes of Families Living in Chicago’s Bungalow Belt

The goal of this project was to use the 500 Cities data to foster a “Culture of Health”- to make the case that health, energy and housing disparities exist by neighborhood, and to engage with local stakeholders to inform cross-cutting policies and programs that improve the health, homes, and communities of families in Chicago, particularly families that live low- and moderate income neighborhoods. These outcomes are not limited to Chicago, however. Equitable health, housing, and community outcomes can be achieved by broad cross-sector collaboration between the energy, health, and housing communities nationally. The specific energy goal for using these data is to inform investment for health and safety policies and programs that can be implemented over the next three years.

Elevate Energy completed the analyses at the end of August 2018 and used the fall of 2018 and Jan-March 2019 to create and execute stakeholder engagement. Our target was six or more meetings with local stakeholders across health, housing, and energy to share findings and discuss strategies for integrating into existing or new programs and policies. Additionally, the learnings were presented to national audiences at 3 conferences.

We were successful with exceeding our target outreach numbers, but more importantly, what we achieved with Urban Institute’s support. We made significant progress toward cross-sector collaboration between the energy, health, and housing communities to achieve more equitable health outcomes and to target resources to the communities that need them most.