Disproportionate Risk at Both Ends: Housing, Health, and Systems of Exposure

Lower-income Black and Latina women with children are especially likely to be impacted by housing insecurity and instability and may engage in increased risk-taking behaviors to prevent housing loss, eviction, or displacement. This article explores housing insecurity as a system of exposure that confers survival-based risk that converges in the lives of women already experiencing some form of precarity. A discussion of vulnerability links disproportionate risk to the current social order, and an expanded reframing of risk is proposed. Finally, historical examples highlight how traditional and contemporary systems of gatekeeping and surveillance serve to increase housing instability and further undermine access to housing for those who need it most. The consistent focus on individual risk in many biomedical models of health obscures the larger issue of fundamental risk factors that lie behind the risk-health relationship. Should risk be conflated with poor individual decision-making, rather than action taken out of need, scarcity, or desperation? The implications of this question for clinicians, researchers, and policymakers are discussed.