Plan Potrero Hill SF

By City and County of San Francisco, Dept. of Public Health

More and more, inter-disciplinary research associates the “built environment” (i.e., land use, transportation systems and community design) with health outcomes and well-being at the population level. For example, healthful neighborhood conditions require adequate and good quality housing; access to public transit, schools, and parks; safe routes for pedestrians and bicyclists; meaningful and productive employment; unpolluted air, soil, and water; and, cooperation, trust, and civic participation.

These built environment factors are generally determined outside the institutional realm of public health, in the purview of Planning, Transportation, Housing and Economic Development agencies. While there are few mandates to consider health in “built environment” planning and policy-making, public health agencies in diverse cities such as San Francisco, Riverside, Denver, and Minneapolis, are increasingly investing in strategies to influence the “built environment” to improve population health and reduce health inequities.

In San Francisco, the Department of Public Health has responded to the need for health and planning tools and guidelines by creating the Healthy Development Measurement Tool, an evidence-based guide for decision-makers to consider the health in land use planning. The Tool encompasses a community-based vision for planning and uses public health to explicitly connect physical and environmental planning to a wider set of social interests. The Tool provides land use planners, public agencies, and community stakeholders with a set of metrics to assess the extent to which urban development projects, plans and policies affect health. Where applied, the Tool thus might help to achieve a higher quality social and physical environment that protects and promotes health.