Communicating for change: News about housing, equity, and health near Yakima

Communicating for change: News about housing, equity, and health near Yakima

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 Yakima focus on housing? Which housing issues are most often covered? And when housing appears in Yakima news, are equity and health part of the conversation? To find out, we used the LexisNexis database to collect articles published in the Tri-City Herald, a nearby 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 Tri-City Herald published 2,909 news articles between June 1, 2020 and May 31, 2021. Only 15 articles focused on housing, representing 0.5% of all 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 half of those housing stories (7 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 Tri-City Herald were about affordable housing (7 articles) or homelessness (7 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 was sparse, and several months had no coverage at all. The coverage peaked in January 2021, February 2021, and April 2021 due to reporting on homelessness and the production of tiny homes. Because coverage is limited in the Yakima area, advocates can piggyback off other issues (e.g., extreme weather, city budgets, local events and elections, etc.) to highlight how housing issues connect with other topics, and how they impact health outcomes.

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.