Sustainability in Community Revitalization: Working at the Intersection of Climate Change, Community Development and Health

Disadvantaged communities experience, disproportionately, the health impacts of climate change. Life stressors such as poverty, housing instability, joblessness, poor health, poor education, and unsafe neighborhood conditions leave people more vulnerable to new threats and exposures. The community development sector has long worked to remediate poverty and improve living conditions in low income communities. In recent years, innovative community developers have engaged in revitalization projects that work to address multiple social determinants of health at once, co-locating both built environment improvements (housing, parks, transportation, commercial space) and programs and services, to bring real transformation to struggling neighborhoods and improvements to the health and lives of residents. Such projects work to build resilience in ways that promise to be protective in the face of climate impacts. And yet, because the community developent sector addresses infrastructure and the built environment, numerous opportunities exist to address sustainability and climate mitigation and adaptation more explicitly and therefore more significantly, an opportunity that, for example, the Green Communities Criteria for affordable housing devleopment codifies and supports.

This study, drawing upon a larger research project examining over 25 case studies of community health hubs, explores the approaches, challenges and solutions encountered in community revitalization projects that explicitly include sustainability and “green” goals in projects that integrate addressing multiple social determinants of health. Based on current understandings of and recommendations for community-based mitigation, adaptation and resilience strategies that support health, we examine how health and climate co-benefits have been incorporated and what barriers exist to more extensive incorporation of “green” goals. We close with a discussion of the limitations of what the community development sector can do with respect to climate change, and discuss the importance of urban and regional planning to ensure that health, mitigation and adaptation targets and goals can be achieved.