Communicating for change: News about housing, equity, and health in New York City

Communicating for change: News about housing, equity, and health in New York City

Our health depends on having stable, safe housing — but inequitable and unjust housing policies limit access to this vital resource for many people in our communities based on factors like race, immigration status, disability status, income-level, gender, and sexuality. The public and policymakers need to understand that housing is a public health issue and that by changing housing policy we can improve community health. News coverage is a key driver of public conversations about health and social justice issues: It influences not only whether people think about housing, but also how they think about it and what they think should be done.

As part of a larger framing analysis for Kresge’s Housing and Health Equity grantees, researchers from Berkeley Media Studies Group (BMSG) are exploring questions like: How often does news from New York City focus on housing? Which housing issues are most often covered? And when housing appears in New York City news, are equity and health part of the conversation? To find out, we used the LexisNexis database to collect articles published in The New York Times, a key local outlet,* between June 1, 2020 to May 31, 2021 about issues such as affordable housing, homelessness, tenant protections, gentrification, and community land trusts.

We found that The New York Times published 94,459 news articles between June 1, 2020 and May 31, 2021; 20,725 of those were local news articles specific to New York City and the five boroughs. Only 396 of these articles focused on housing, representing 1.9% of local news in the paper. Because housing issues are themselves interconnected, search terms were not mutually exclusive; in other words, one article could reference multiple housing issues. Nearly three-quarters of housing stories (276 articles) included equity or health-related terms such as “well-being,” “illness,” “disparities,” “low-income,” or “communities of color.”

The majority of stories from The New York Times were about affordable housing (185 articles) or homelessness (156 articles), while other housing issues were less visible. Advocates could pitch stories that build on this attention but expand the frame to show how housing issues are interconnected, and how they all affect health outcomes.

News about housing peaked in September 2020, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered an eviction moratorium, and again in February 2021 due to controversies surrounding homelessness (e.g., new subway rules due to increased crimes) and upcoming mayoral elections. Changes in housing policy, or local controversies related to housing, provide windows of opportunity for advocates to communicate about complex issues with the public. By monitoring housing news, advocates can piggyback off such increases in coverage to highlight the specific issues related to housing and homelessness they are working on.

BMSG is continuing to analyze news coverage to inform local media advocacy campaigns to create healthy communities where anyone, regardless of what they look like or where they come from, can live in safe and stable housing. To learn more about BMSG’s work on framing analysis and media advocacy for public health and social justice issues, visit BMSG.org.

Methods: Our research was informed by a survey of grantees funded by the Kresge Foundation’s Advancing Health Equity Through Housing (HEH) initiative. Grantees are working across housing issues including affordable housing, homelessness, tenant protections, gentrification and displacement, and community land trusts. We used the LexisNexis archive to collect news articles from one of the highest circulation news outlets in each grantee’s media market (N = 22 outlets): We used search terms related to equity or health (such as “health,” “disease,” “illness,” “equity,” “disparity,” “low-income,” “racism,” etc.) as well as the specific housing issues named in the survey.

*While The New York Times covers local news and events, the outlet is among the top five outlets circulated nationally and includes national and international coverage. For this analysis, we only included stories that mentioned “New York City” or any of the city’s five boroughs.