Federal housing assistance benefits 11 million people through three main programs: public housing, project-based Section 8 housing, and housing choice vouchers. Researchers use multiple datasets to examine the effects of federal housing assistance programs on food security, health-promoting behaviors, and health outcomes.
National Coordinating Center
The Policies for Action program is overseen by the Urban Institute, building on the organization's wealth of experience in health, social, and economic policy, including its cross-center initiative on the social determinants of health.
As the national coordinating center, Urban works in close partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to manage the program and its network of grantees, providing strategic direction, technical assistance and training, and communication and outreach support. Urban also conducts high-impact policy research to complement the growing portfolio of Policies for Action-funded work happening across the country. Current projects include investigations of housing assistance programs, work policies, health care quality and access, income supplements, and more.
Research projects
This series of case studies identifies and describes several emerging and promising interventions that sit at the intersection of housing and health across the country. Interventions reflect a variety of approaches and models from a diversity of communities and will span both the public and private sectors.
This study examines whether a community intervention monitoring glucose and providing diabetes appropriate food can improve health and reduce health care utilization. It builds on Feeding America’s Intervention Trial for Health-Diabetes Mellitus (FAITH-DM) study with a new follow-up round of data collection and new data analyses.
This study will examine how social spending and Medicaid policies influence child health and development. Analysis will be based on NSCH data matched by birth cohort and state to historical government spending data from the Census of Governments. Multivariate analysis will be used to examine the impacts of state spending by developmental phase on health.
