Maine Event: Day 67

TGIF. Today was a full day and now I'm tired. It is also really the last week we are here. So strange.

I've been reading about data concerns about tracking the social determinants of health. This is the kind of thing we discussed in school. I keep coming back to smaller disaggregated systems that work better, and yet we always want to make them larger and more systematic. Just think a community health worker that comes to your house and works with the family is going to know the social determinants of that family (even if they don't call them that). At the same time, funded, valued, and respected public health agencies clearly need to have systems, and even more important they need to have agency.

This is the same conversation that I studied in detail around the effort to create a database that tracks all the details about each homeless person. In some ways, that is even more important, as they often have multiple serious health issues and they are not easily found in one location like the rest of us. In addition, they need resources from many different departments and support and without a way to manage that humans end up getting lost in the system. 

Homelessness here in Maine is such a different problem. In the whole state there were 1,215 people that were homeless in 2019. About 90 of those were unsheltered at the point-in-time count. That seems somehow much more solvable. I've heard my whole life that you shouldn't spend more than 30% of your income on housing. It has always seemed like good advice, but unfortunately, often impossible to follow. But it is pretty clear in communities when rents are raised beyond 30% there is a rise in homelessness. Somehow it feels like given this we should be able to work backwards to better strategies to take down the system that makes housing a source of profit. The U.S. has 660,000 Airbnb listings. There are an estimated 553,742 people in the U.S. experiencing homelessness.

Enough of that. Now for some beauty!

Goliath kale plant.

Front yard garden on our walk. Note the yellow plants are milkweed that the monarchs like in summer.

And a side yard on our walk.

This is the best Halloween town ever. The houses are spooky all on their own and then they go all out on decorations.

Happy Friday!

Sending you extra love,

Tawnia