(upbeat music) ♪ Hey, hey, hey ♪ Hey, hey, hey ♪ ♪ Hey, hey ♪ - Good evening and welcome to Horizonte, a show that takes a look at current issues through a Hispanic lens.

I'm your host, Catherine Anaya.

Tonight we'll tell you about a new center that is designed to improve housing issues in Arizona's Hispanic communities and how those issues relate to climate and health.

The US Department of Housing and Urban Development has handed out one of its first Hispanic Serving Institutions, Center of Excellence grants to create the Arizona Research Center for Housing Equity and Sustainability, also known as the ARCHES Center.

The $3 million Center will be located at Arizona State University and the University of Arizona.

Here to talk more about the ARCHES Center is Alison Cook Davis Co-director of ARCHES, and Deirdre Pfeiffer, an associate professor in ASU School of Geographical Sciences and urban planning, as well as the principal investigator for ARCHES.

Ladies, thank you so much for joining me.

- Thanks for having us.

- Appreciate you being here.

So congratulations, This is significant.

How significant though is it that Arizona State University has been named an HSI, as we mentioned just a moment ago, and that it's one of the first to receive this very important grant?

- It means we're getting a lot of attention right now and resources coming in to address the needs of Arizona's Hispanic communities, which is really exciting.

And this is important because we have some pretty high needs related to housing in our Hispanic communities within the state.

One of them is Hispanic households, a lot less likely to be homeowners in Arizona than households who are non-Hispanic, white.

And so the center is gonna help to address some of those issues.

- Absolutely and it's a $3 million grant that's gonna fund and sustain research for the ARCHES Center over the next three years, located, as I mentioned, at ASU and U of A.

What specific areas or issues do you plan on exploring, researching, studying, and hopefully coming up with solutions for?

- Alison do you wanna take that on or should I jump in?

- Well we have a large number of researchers across multiple institutions.

So it's not just at ASU and U of A, but also Northern Arizona University and University of New Mexico are also partners for our center.

And the research has been designed across three separate pillars, and those pillars include housing, security, climate, and also health and how housing sort of interacts with all those three things.

- I'd like to go in depth on those three pillars if we can.

We know home affordability and access and housing insecurity is an issue in Arizona and of course across the country.

What do you see contributing to this major housing gap that we're seeing?

- Yeah, so our center is gonna be addressing both the drivers of this gap as well as solutions.

So what can we do to help, you know, reduce the gap that we're seeing?

So some of the drivers that we're gonna be exploring, we're gonna be exploring the role of housing discrimination that might be happening when households go to buy a home and are interacting with different people that are a part of that process of buying a home.

We're also gonna be exploring the language that people are using to talk about, you know, housing and new housing coming into Arizona and thinking about, you know, are there ways that we can adapt that language so that people are able to see the co-benefits, right?

That could happen when we bring new housing into communities.

Some of the solutions that we're exploring, we're exploring something called shared equity home ownership.

So where, you know, a household might own the house that they're buying, but not the land.

The land might be owned by a community organization and the household, you know, accumulates equity or wealth that builds in the home, but then, you know, the ownership of the land by a community organization helps to keep that house affordable and at a lower price point when the household wants to eventually sell it.

So we're exploring some of these new strategies.

- Right, very big issues of course in our community.

And this past summer we also saw for a lot of people the significance of the extreme heat and its impact on housing.

Just how dire is the situation, would you say in our Hispanic community across Arizona?

- Unfortunately we see like higher heat in Hispanic communities and lower socioeconomic areas, up to a five degree temperature difference can be experienced.

And we have seen year over year having more and more heat events and heat illnesses and even deaths related to heat.

And so we are looking at sort of how housing impacts this, specifically looking at indoor heat and how there are factors around the house that can exacerbate heat and therefore impact both health and even the financial precarity of having to pay high cost of energy.

- Well and health and housing is another one of the pillars that you're going to be exploring.

So how does health relate to the housing situation that we are seeing that we're talking about here?

- Yeah, I mean Alison was talking about you know, the kind of material that your home is constructed out of, it affects how you experience heat, right?

So if we look at the heat related deaths in Maricopa County, a significant proportion of them actually occurred in people's homes, which is devastating.

Aside from that though, where your home is located affects your access to so many other things that affect your health and wellbeing, hospitals, schools, grocery stores.

And so it's not just the kind of home that you live in, but also where your home is located that you know deeply impacts what your quality of life is gonna be in your health.

- And this is really important for our community to understand is that you are looking at these issues, your hopefully going to be able to solve some of these issues in the next three years and beyond.

It's only been a few months of work since you've been at the ARCHES Center.

Would you describe having an immediate impact so far?

- Well, the most immediate impact we've had is that we've built new infrastructure to help start addressing the housing challenges that Arizona's Hispanic communities are facing.

So as Alison mentioned, we've brought together researchers from all of our state universities as well as University of New Mexico.

We brought together community partners from across our state and we've just established a community advisory board that brings together leaders of the Hispanic community as well as housing related organizations and others together to help shape the direction of ARCHES.

- And I think that's really important that you're involving community partners because you're talking about organizations that have been firmly entrenched in the communities for many, many years.

Is there a push for public education to make sure that our communities understand not only that you exist, but that you are taking these issues very seriously and looking for ways to come up with solutions?

- Absolutely, I mean, I think our goal is to be able to, you know, sort of use research as a basis for being able to help inform decisions in policy and practice also.

And part of that, you know are... What am I trying to say?

Like our, like community partners and stuff like that is that we're really trying to create situations where we're creating mutual beneficial relationships- - [Catherine] Collaborations, yeah.

Yeah and we're able to actually find opportunities where we can help them, you know, either provide data or research that can help guide policy and practice, or even be able to use data to potentially get additional funding for services or programs that they're looking to implement and they see a need for in the community.

- You mentioned that you have a lot of researchers on hand to help with the center, almost two dozen, but being that you are at a university, couple of universities, how are you going to involve students in some of what you're doing?

Because I think that's pretty critical to educating our youngsters as well and making them a part of the solution.

- Absolutely, so a lot of our research is actually going to involve students.

So we're gonna be training students to go out and collect the data that we're gonna be using to tell the stories about Arizona's housing issues, and we're gonna be training them to be Arizona's new housing leaders, right?

Who are gonna be able to go out into local communities and organizations and bring new energy and skills to help address these housing challenges.

- Are there any opportunities for the community to get involved in what ARCHES is doing at this point?

- Well, we are in the process of meeting with community organizations and many people who are kind of doing the work on the ground, and I really see opportunities for... You know, I've been trying to reach out to organizations, but certainly I welcome people to reach out to us through ARCHES because we really do want this to be community based research, and we want to be using the expertise that we have in our communities, especially those who are doing the work.

- Absolutely, and as we mentioned, it's a three year grant, but the hope is that you'll be able to sustain it for far longer because those issues may or may not be completely solved in three years.

And so the research that you're doing is so critical to making sure that those solutions happen sooner than later.

- [Deirdre] Absolutely.

- Well, thank you ladies.

I appreciate you joining me and explaining how ARCHES works and congratulations on the grant.

- Thank you so much for having us.

- Than you.

Nice to have you here.

And that's our show for tonight, for Horizonte and Arizona PBS, I'm Katherine Anaya, thanks for joining us, have a great evening.

(upbeat music) ♪ Hey, hey, hey ♪ Hey, hey, hey ♪ Hey, hey