Mental health is a housing issue: what East Harlem has always known

“Before the research caught up, East Harlem already knew.”

It knew in the way grandmothers kept watch from windows. In the way neighbors shared plates without being asked. In the way a block — one specific block, with its specific smells and sounds and faces — could hold a person together when everything else was falling apart.

Community was never a soft word here. It was structural. It was survival.

This is a post about mental health. But it is also a post about home — and what happens to the mind, the body, and the spirit when home is taken.

The wound that doesn’t get named

When clinicians talk about social determinants of mental health, they list housing as a checkbox. Stable housing: yes or no. But that framing misses everything that matters.

It misses the family that stayed in a two-bedroom apartment with nine people because that apartment was theirs, and the street outside it was theirs, and the church on the corner was theirs — and that belonging was worth more than square footage. It misses the particular grief of watching a neighborhood become unrecognizable. Of passing storefronts that used to have your people’s names on them. Of feeling like a stranger on the block where you were born.

That grief has a name in community psychology: solastalgia — the distress caused by environmental change in one’s home place. But East Harlem didn’t need a clinical term for it. They felt it every time a neighbor lost a lease. Every time a building went condo. Every time the skyline changed and the people who built it couldn’t afford to stay.

What belonging actually does to the body

There is now substantial research on what social belonging does to human physiology. Sustained connection with trusted community lowers cortisol, regulates the nervous system, and buffers against the physical effects of chronic stress. Loneliness, by contrast, activates the same neural pathways as physical pain.

But belonging isn’t just about having people nearby. It is about place. About knowing which bodega will let you run a tab. About the elderly woman on the fourth floor who watches your children when you’re running late. About the Dominican restaurant that’s been there since you were seven, and the way the smell of it still means safety.

When displacement breaks those networks — not just relationships, but the physical geography that holds them — the nervous system registers it as loss. Not metaphorical loss. Biological loss.

East Harlem has been navigating that loss for decades. And the community has been doing what it has always done: healing itself, holding itself, finding ways to rebuild the connective tissue that keeps people whole.

The medicine that never left

In African and Afro-diasporic philosophy, the idea that a person cannot be well apart from their community is foundational. Ubuntu — I am because we are — is not a wellness philosophy layered onto a community in crisis. It is the original architecture of survival. It is what got people through the Middle Passage, through redlining, through every wave of dispossession that followed.

It shows up in El Barrio as mutual aid networks that predate the term. In the comadres who passed down plant medicine through kitchen conversations. In the elders who held council on stoops before anyone called it restorative practice. In the faith communities that provided food, shelter, and spiritual anchoring when institutions failed.

None of this was incidental. It was intentional community care — passed down through generations precisely because the people who built East Harlem knew that their survival depended on one another.

What it means to stay

There is something profound and defiant about staying in a neighborhood that the market keeps trying to price you out of. It is not just an economic act. It is a spiritual one.

To stay is to insist that your history has value. That the relationships you’ve built over decades are not transferable. That the particular way your community holds grief, celebrates new life, feeds its elders, and raises its children together — that all of this is irreplaceable, and worth protecting.

And for those who were pushed out — those who carry East Harlem in their bodies even when they no longer live there — staying connected to community, to culture, to the people and practices that shaped you, is its own form of return. The roots don’t sever just because the address changes.

Community is the medicine

At Ubuntu Village, we say it plainly: community is the medicine. Not a supplement to the real treatment. Not a soft skill. The medicine itself.

We see it in East Harlem. We see it in Nairobi, in Lagos, in Kampala — wherever people are navigating structural harm and still finding ways to hold each other with dignity and intention. The circumstances differ. The truth does not: humans heal in community, or they struggle to heal at all.

Mental health policy that ignores housing is incomplete. Mental health practice that isolates the individual from their community context is working against itself. And any framework for healing that doesn’t center the wisdom already living inside these communities is leaving the most powerful medicine on the table.

East Harlem didn’t need the research to know this. It has always known.

What it needs — what every community navigating displacement needs — is for the rest of the world to finally catch up.

Community is the medicine.

Ubuntu Village builds programs rooted in that truth — in East Harlem, Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria. When you support our work, you’re investing in the infrastructure of collective healing.

References

• Albrecht, G. (2003). Solastalgia: a new concept in human health and identity. Philosophy, Activism, Nature.
• Cacioppo, J.T. & Hawkley, L.C. (2003). Social isolation and health, with an emphasis on underlying mechanisms. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine.
• Marmot, M. (2005). Social determinants of health inequalities. The Lancet.
• Desmond Tutu Peace Foundation. Ubuntu: I am because we are.
• NYC Department of City Planning. East Harlem neighborhood data and planning documents.

Michele Mitchell is the Founder, President & CEO of Ubuntu Village Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit rooted in East Harlem, New York, with programs in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria. A writer, advocate, and community strategist working at the intersection of ancestral wisdom, public health, and community power, Michele leads Ubuntu Village’s work to center communities as the protagonists of their own healing. She writes from the conviction that science and spirit are complementary, that healing is relational, and that community is the medicine.