As advocates push for the inclusion of affordable housing beyond the central city, siting battles have become increasingly common. Opponents often claim that affordable housing brings no net benefits to the community and that it threatens neighborhood property values. This review considers existing evidence regarding the relationship between the provision of quality affordable housing and benefits to the larger community. Evidence is considered in the areas of health and education. Given the high level of public concern with these two issues, evidence of benefits could be especially potent in public discussions of affordable housing. Future research is proposed in each area.

Improving housing is seen not only as a benefit to individual households, but integral to the health of the entire community. The field of city planning began, in part, because of concerns about the effects of poor housing conditions on the broader community. The urban reform movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are often cited as antecedents of city planning in the United States. Together, reformers united concern for the moral character and sanitary and physical well-being of the largely immigrant residents of tenement housing in newly industrial cities. Progressive era workers embodied the connection between housing, health, and overall social well-being (Stivers 1995; Birch 1994; Davis 1967).