Creating Healthy Communities

December 2011

"People are healthier when the places where they live and work support good health," said Sandra R. Hernández, M.D., CEO of The San Francisco Foundation, at the start of a national web forum about promoting healthy communities. To create safe and healthy neighborhoods, everyone from citizens to policymakers, and funders to city planners must work together to improve policies and environments.

Dr. Hernández served as moderator of the first in a three-part series of web forums co-presented with the Public Health Institute's Dialogue4Health. Entitled "The Built Environment: Health Policy in Concrete," the forum took place on Tuesday, November 29. TSFF’s community development program director Vanitha Venugopal also participated on the four-member panel that drew over 400 attendees from around the country to talk about how issues of community development, transit, environment, and jobs must be looked at holistically in order to transform lives and build healthier and stronger communities.

Dr. Richard Jackson, a professor in UCLA’s department of environmental health sciences, described the failure of transportation planning that focused solely on highways to relieve congestion in urban areas. He also discussed the links between cars and health problems such as crashes, obesity, and asthma. Dr. Jackson called for planning of physical environments that allow people to walk or bike in addition to social and cultural changes to improve health.

The concept of “health impact assessments,” or HIAs, was explored by Dr. Rajiv Bhatia, director of occupational and environmental health at the San Francisco Department of Public Health. The purpose of HIAs is to include an evaluation of health impacts, such as pollution and injuries, in any planning. While the concept is still new, Bhatia’s agency convinced the San Francisco planning department to include HIAs in its transportation planning for the Bay Area.

TSFF’s Venogupal detailed the work of Great Communities Collaborative (GCC), a public-private partnership supported by the Foundation to "engage community in planning around existing and new transit stations." As the Metropolitan Transportation Commission plans for major growth in the region, GCC works closely with communities to help them understand and influence decision making. To support more development near transit, TSFF was instrumental in creating a source of financing known as the Transit-Oriented Affordable Housing (TOAH) Fund, a $50 million fund drawn from public, philanthropic, and private sources.

The last speaker was Julia Liou of Asian Health Services (AHS), who shared the work that AHS and the Oakland Chinatown Coalition are doing to shape planning near Lake Merritt. AHS surveyed community members to identify needs such as public safety, jobs, and housing. The data will help AHS determine which policies to seek during the planning process.

We tweeted live throughout the event, including quotes and graphs from the presentation, and will also be tweeting throughout the next two "Healthy People Live in Healthy Places" web forums—one on healthy homes and the other on supportive housing. We'll be posting more about these upcoming forums soon on sff.org's calendar.