New Brunswick Healthy Housing Collaborative

ABOUT

The New Brunswick Healthy Housing Collaborative will use lessons learned and momentum built around healthy housing over the past two years as we work to develop and drive policy changes that ensure healthier homes. The Collaborative will work with the City to improve housing-related city ordinances and operational efficiencies to enable stable and healthy housing. Integrated support will be provided through a sustainable medical-legal partnership and case management to aid in ensuring tenant rights and address health issues. Community engagement, driven by community health ambassadors, will build awareness of tenant rights in the community and empower the mobilization of efforts necessary to drive policy changes.

Health Equity

We are working to eliminate health disparities by bringing supportive services outside the medical setting. This resident-led effort, the Community Ambassador Team, will support healthy home efforts for improving living conditions and mitigating unhealthy environments. With the community health ambassadors, alongside institutional supports for case management and legal services, we work with tenants, landlords and the City to create housing standards and to remediate problems within the home that impact health.

Bold

An integral part of this initiative would be to lead the City’s efforts to adopt more effective policies that improve housing conditions, while identifying best administrative practices to facilitate enforcement. The action plan would review current housing and zoning ordinances to determine recommendations for strengthening them, while working simultaneously to improve transparency and communication between the rent control office, housing inspectors, and community residents.

Upstream

The Collaborative’s goal is to institute effective and enforceable housing standards by mobilizing community residents to drive policy and system changes that will lead to safe and healthy homes. The Collaborative will look to align with other local efforts that seek to create quality and affordable units in the city through rehabilitation and new construction. In turn, these aligned efforts become a comprehensive approach to truly creating a city with safe and affordable housing.

Integrated

Building participation from all stakeholders has been a key factor for the New Brunswick Healthy Housing Collaborative. Our plan operationalizes health equity through a partnership-led initiative of private and public entities that is governed by residets. This strengthens the community’s voice to advocate for change and allows the partnership to align efforts and strategies to sustain resident momentum, increase resources, and accommodate institutional missions that address a community need.

Local

We are aiming to develop a tenant association to serve as a vehicle for advocacy and policy change at the city. This association would serve as a forum for New Brunswick residents to discuss and strategize opportunities as a mechanism to recommend and advocate for improvement to housing conditions. Having the association’s input in the policy development process will ensure that any revisions to existing ordinances or adoption of new housing or zoning ordinances will be equitable.

Data-Driven

Data from home assessments will serve as the foundation for an ordinance review process and assist in the identification of recommendations for policy changes. Each policy recommendation will be assessed for its feasibility and long term health impacts. A data sharing platform will be used to share data among partners to monitor and evaluate success by using the New Brunswick Tomorrow Community Survey of New Brunswick residents, which measures perceptions on various aspects of quality of life issues.