Housing as the Primary Health Concern

May 14, 2024

By Kathleen Miller

Mount Desert Island Hospital and Healthy Acadia have recently completed the 2024 Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) and Action Plan for the Mount Desert Island Region. This includes the four MDI towns plus Cranberry Isles, Frenchboro, Swan's Island, Hancock, Lamoine, and Trenton. This assessment and plan, which are federally required every three years, serves as a framework and guide for the Hospital, Healthy Acadia, and partner organizations in developing and strengthening their programming and services to fulfill community needs. The Action Plan provides insights into six themes: Access to Care, Aging in Place, Basic Needs, Community Connectedness, Housing, and Mental and Behavioral Health, including Substance Use. The full report can be found here.

Of special note from this report, and relevant to our work on Heel Way and beyond, was the key finding shared in the Executive Summary:

"Over 60% of the 412 people who completed the Community Health Survey identified "safe and affordable housing" as a top concern in addressing community health, the highest rating of all issues."

The impact of that statement is powerful – housing as the top concern for our community’s health!

Public input was gathered via a survey distributed as broadly as possible in the hospital’s local service area. Survey respondents were asked to identify what they saw as the most important “health concerns” in our community, selecting up to 5 items from a list of 28. That safe and affordable housing was the top response, and more than 10% above than the next highest concern – costs of care and/or prescriptions – tells us clearly that housing issues are at the very core of our community’s well-being. One might expect that kind of statement from an organization such as ours, but it was something of a surprise outcome on a hospital healthcare survey.

So let me rephrase this just a bit – the majority of respondents to a health survey are more concerned about the cost of housing than they are about the cost of healthcare and prescriptions.

Many of us are keenly aware of the lack of quality, affordable housing inventory, on MDI, in Maine and across the country. The impact is far reaching, and is often at the root of so many other concerns – adequate levels of staffing for healthcare or emergency services like paramedics, the availability and cost of services like plumbing, electrical work, car repairs, and so much more. So, whether you need medical, dental, or mental health attention, care for aging residents, childcare so parents can work, home or car repair, or a host of other needs, the lack of available housing is having a negative impact.

That negative impact is not just long wait times for services. It also drives up costs for just about everything. Local readers have surely also seen the recent news about the Bar Harbor Food Pantry’s expansion to meet the growing need. They seem to be reaching new usage levels about every week. And that is no surprise, as we see rent increases of over 50% too often on MDI. More and more people are having to make the difficult choice between food and rent.

In fact, the impact of the lack of safe and affordable housing came through loud and clear in the rest of the CHNA report. Each of the six Theme Working Groups included housing as a critical factor contributing to challenges in those other topic areas. To quote some of the respondents:

“Affordable housing is our biggest challenge to keep a year round community sustainable.”

“I have had housing struggles, and at points been worried that I would have to sacrifice food for rent. I would never have been able to afford housing without external help which had an impact on my mental health.”

In the report’s conclusion, there was a list of the strongest signals heard, and the very first item was housing:

“Housing is at a crisis point and complicates solutions to many other community health issues, particularly staffing to expand access to care and to decrease wait times. Without housing solutions, access to care will continue to be challenged by the ability to recruit and retain staff.”

Thank you, MDI Hospital and Healthy Acadia for the time and intention that went into this valuable report, for quantifying this critical concern, and for connecting the dots between housing and community health and wellbeing.