Primer series
The Sustainable Habitat series covers housing, home energy, transportation, and broadband, and how each one shows up in household budgets and health.
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Primers
Draft
Geothermal Energy and the Social Determinants of Health
Adler Archer, JD · 2026
Most people picture the social determinants of health as housing, food, income, and access to care. Energy rarely makes the headline list, yet it sits underneath several of the others. The temperature inside a home, the reliability of the power that runs a medical device, and the share of a household budget swallowed by a utility bill all shape health long before anyone reaches a clinic.
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Getting There: Transportation as the Cost of Access to Work, Care, and Food
V. Viyas Thilagarajan, MS · 2026
A job is only a job you can get to. A clinic is only useful if you can reach it on the day of the appointment. Healthy food is only an option if the store is within reach and the trip is affordable. For a great many households, the binding constraint on work, health, and nutrition is not the thing itself but the distance to it and the cost of crossing that distance. This primer is about transportation as access, a…
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The Energy Burden Map: Who Pays the Most, and Why It Tracks Health
Adler Archer, JD · 2026
Health systems have grown comfortable asking patients about housing and food. They rarely ask about the energy bill, yet that number shapes the same outcomes. When a household spends too large a share of its income keeping the lights and heat on, the consequences spill into nutrition, medication adherence, housing stability, and the chronic stress that wears the body down over time.
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The Foundation Under Everything: Housing Affordability and the Cost of Instability
Brandy Hampton, MBA · 2026
For most households, rent or the mortgage is the largest single expense, the one that gets paid before food, before medicine, before saving for anything. When that cost climbs out of reach, everything else in a family's life bends around it. This primer is about housing affordability as the foundation under every other measure of a livable community, and about why instability, the constant risk of losing one's hom…
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The New Utility: Broadband as the Infrastructure of Opportunity
Samuel Washington, MS · 2026
Applying for a job, seeing a doctor, helping a child with homework, managing benefits, running a small business: each of these increasingly assumes a reliable internet connection. What was once an amenity has quietly become a utility, as essential to participating in a community as water or power. This primer is about broadband as infrastructure of opportunity, and about why the gap is no longer mainly about wheth…
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Weatherization as Preventive Medicine
Adler Archer, JD · 2026
Insulation, air sealing, and a tighter building envelope are usually filed under energy efficiency. This primer argues they belong, just as accurately, under preventive medicine. A home that holds its temperature, stays dry, and resists mold is a home that produces fewer asthma flare-ups, fewer respiratory infections, less cardiovascular strain, and better mental health. The upgrade that lowers the energy bill is …
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Who Owns the Community Microgrid? Energy as Governed Infrastructure
Adler Archer, JD · 2026
Community solar arrays, neighborhood microgrids, and shared battery systems are spreading quickly, and they hold real promise for the households this series keeps returning to: renters, residents of multifamily buildings, and low-income families who cannot put panels on a roof they do not own. But underneath the optimism sits a question that determines whether the promise lasts. A community can host an energy asse…
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