Housing Can Remedy Public Health Disparities
As the first project funded by CLF’s Healthy Neighborhoods Fund, Chelsea Flats showcases inclusive and sustainable development.

As the first project funded by CLF’s Healthy Neighborhoods Fund, Chelsea Flats showcases inclusive and sustainable development.
This report provides an overview of our experience with the Healthy Neighborhoods Equity Fund (HNEF). We hope to inform other efforts investing in housing and retail in ways that can lead to equitable changes in neighborhood health and environmental conditions.
It’s tempting to boil down good health solely to factors like medical care, healthy food, and exercise. However, many other dynamics, like historic redlining and racial segregation, along with substandard housing, air pollution, crumbling infrastructure, and lack of access to jobs, healthy food, and green space, all play a role. Perhaps no one understands the interplay of these factors better than those who work in healthcare, including Dr. Thea James, who serves as Boston Medical Center’s Associate Chief Medical Officer, Vice President of Mission, and Director of the Violence Prevention.
The presidential election result is a welcome relief – especially amid the ongoing stresses of an unrelenting pandemic, hobbling economic hardship, and an overdue racial reckoning. We all deserve to take a moment and celebrate that. But even as we see the core values of our democracy vindicated after relentless voter suppression efforts, now is not the time to grow complacent.
CLF forges partnerships with maritime companies to leverage a creative funding solution for clean air: the EPA’s Diesel Emissions Reduction Act (DERA).
Covid-19 has laid bare the profound impact that your neighborhood has on your health. People in low-income communities of color with higher levels of pollution and overcrowded housing are being sickened and killed by the virus at much higher rates.
This new rapid Health Impact Assessment (HIA) explores how transit-oriented development impacts health and contributes to social, environmental, and economic changes. A collaboration between the Metropolitan Area Planning Council and Conservation Law Foundation
Kevin Breunig comes to CLF with experience in both the corporate technology sector and nonprofit management. After 15 years in enterprise software marketing, he followed his passion for the outdoors to work with environmental organizations. Kevin was VP of Communications and Marketing at the Appalachian Mountain Club, where he led efforts on brand strategy, digital… Continue reading Kevin Breunig
In times of change and upheaval, there is also room for hope and inspiration. While we collectively have much hard work ahead of us, we also have much to commend. Our hope is that this report offers insight into the work that your support makes possible – and inspiration for what we know we can accomplish together.
This Field Guide describes how the partners in the Healthy Neighborhoods Study do research in 9 communities in Greater Metropolitan Boston. The project uses the Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach, which is grounded in the idea that the people who are most impacted by a problem are in the best position to understand and solve that problem. After years of research together, we wrote this guide for other communities interested in Participatory Action Research.