Human Outcomes workability, and Mortality in Public Housing Arrears Systems

Abstract

While public housing arrears are typically framed as financial obligations remediable through payment compliance, this framing obscures the human costs produced by long-term debt containment systems. This paper examines how persistent housing debt shapes bodily health, labor capacity, psychological regulation, and mortality risk. Drawing on socio-technical systems theory and public health literature, it argues that prolonged exposure to enforcement-based housing systems produces predictable degradation of human function, rendering death not incidental but structurally foreseeable.