This is a reply to Memmott et al's (2022) chapter on ‘Aboriginal social housing in remote Australia: crowded, unrepaired and raising the risk of infectious diseases’. It is not hard to see that the physical environment of the home is likely to have a significant impact on health. Problems such as leaking toilets, uneven stairs, mouldy walls and crowding clearly create health-and-safety risks. This relationship is recognised in World Health Organization (WHO, 2018) housing and health guidelines, with crowding identified as increasing risks to mental and physical health. These problems disproportionately affect low-income renters, who have limited capacity to remedy such issues (Robinson and Adams, 2008). This relationship between housing and mental and physical well-being significantly contributes to intergenerational poverty (McKnight and Cowell, 2014).

The central role of housing for individual and community well-being has been known for centuries. After all, it is housing's impact on health that has historically been the primary justification for slum-clearance programmes, and this remains the case in many countries. Yet, policy has been slow to address this connection, even though health services bear most of the cost of poor-quality housing. This is the case for Indigenous housing, where poverty, housing exclusion, underfunding of the social and affordable housing sector, and government neglect more generally result in high rates of crowding and deteriorated dwellings in countries including the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia (Habibis et al, 2018; Lea, 2020). Despite this, there is a surprising dearth of research on the processes and mechanisms that make many Indigenous homes sites of illness and injury. Memmott et al's (2022) chapter is therefore a welcome contribution in its effort to add to the evidence base on housing and infectious disease among Indigenous peoples in Australia.