This story first appeared on WBUR 90.9FM Boston's NPR News Station on June 28, 2017. Listen to it— and read it— here.

Chuck Gyukeri is a Navy vet who was homeless back in 2009, and has been living in subsidized apartments ever since. Now supported by disability benefits and Section 8 vouchers, he lives in a small, street-level apartment on the back corner of a handsome brownstone near Fields Corner.

The inside of the Waldeck buildings needs work, Gyukeri said in an interview as he swatted the flies buzzing around his head, but he’s grateful to have his own place.

“I know I got someplace stable now,” he said while standing outside the apartment he has lived in for the last three years, his two cats slinking around behind the building with a third cat from the neighborhood. “I don’t have to worry about being out homeless again. It makes me feel comfortable about myself, that I’m able to come in and out of my own home. And I’m getting my health issues together.”

Gyukeri’s apartment is in one of four brownstones on Waldeck Street — 35 units that came close to losing their affordable status. Gyukeri was part of a tenant organizing campaign — led by City Life/Vida Urbana — that resulted in the complex coming under the ownership of Codman Square Neighborhood Development Corporation (NDC).

Conditions were so bad under the previous owner, Codman NDC officials say, that the tenants had north of $3 million in claims against him relating to negligence of the building. In exchange for tenants dropping their complaints, a bankruptcy judge granted ownership of the Waldeck complex – and the Orlando development in Mattapan – to Codman NDC.

Now that the 59 affordable units at Waldeck and Orlando have been preserved, Codman NDC says there’s a long way to go before they’re up to code.

“It’s a little roach-infested right now; I’m trying to handle that,” said Gyukeri, managing to keep a smile despite an overwhelming odor permeating his apartment. “The weird thing is that something died. It might’ve been a mouse.”

A third of the units in Waldeck are uninhabitable, according to Codman Square NDC. But now, thanks to an $800,000 investment from Boston Medical Center, Codman says it wants to turn this row of downtrodden buildings into a paragon of a well-being situation.

“Only about 10 to 20 percent of health is actually determined by what type of healthcare you get,” said Dr. Megan Sandel, one of the leaders of BMC’s housing initiative. “Much more [significant are] the social determinants of health – where you live, what your environment is like. And so more and more we’re starting to screen for people’s social determinants.”

The Waldeck project represents one of nine investments for BMC involving a total of $6.5 million that the hospital has designated for housing in some of Boston’s poorest areas. Advocates say BMC’s investment is part of a burgeoning shift among healthcare leaders to view housing as a key “social determinant” of health.

Now, a handful of area hospitals are starting to put their money into housing.

BMC’s housing involvement is tied to renovations on its campus in the South End. The state requires that 5 percent of the cost of any hospital expansion be reinvested in community health. BMC chose to spend the money on housing.

The initiative includes $1 million to help families fight evictions, $1 million to create a housing stabilization program for people with complex medical issues, and $1 million to support a grocery store at a development in Roxbury.

Dr. Sandel says that while there was little resistance among BMC officials to investing in housing, it remains an experiment that still needs to be proven. “I think where people need to be convinced is in the business model. Can we actually show that this is something that’s going to reduce costs and improve health outcomes?” she said, adding that it has to make sense for BMC’s bottom line.

BMC is not the only hospital in Massachusetts looking to improve health by improving housing. Boston Children’s Hospital recently set aside $5 million, and BayState in Springfield is also dedicating funding to housing needs.

John Erwin is the executive director of the Conference of Boston Teaching Hospitals, which is heading up a community needs assessment of Boston’s health care institutions that will conclude in 2019. He says that housing could be identified as a major social determinant of health that requires collective action from the city’s hospitals, health centers, and nonprofits.

Erwin adds that it’s not just about housing the poor: “We’re seeing it from the patient perspective, but also as large employers in the city. It’s increasingly difficult for our own employees to find affordable housing in the city – and when you’re trying to attract workers from other parts of the country, housing becomes a factor.”

Getting healthcare leaders onto the housing bandwagon could make a big difference politically, said Joe Kreisberg, head of the Massachusetts Association of Community Development Corporations. “The housing challenges we face as a city and a state are overwhelming, and the amount of money that we would need to provide affordable housing to every low and moderate-income family is a staggering number,” he said. “And the healthcare sector, even the health care sector, is not going to be able to do that.”

Kreisberg estimates that Massachusetts spends about 40 percent of its money on healthcare, and 1 percent on housing. If healthcare leaders start speaking out about the need for more and better housing, he says that could help change the ratio in the long term.

But residents at the Waldeck development in Dorchester say change can’t come fast enough. They concede that things have improved since Codman NDC took over – that is, they actually maintain the building and respond to repair requests – but the tenants are ready for an end to the pest infestation and drug use there.

“It’s kind of hard, you wake up in the morning and there’s someone on your hallway,” said Derrick Farley, who has lived at Waldeck since the beginning of the year. He said it occasionally falls to him to kick drug users out of the building. “Sometimes I don’t feel safe.”

Asked if he wants to continue living at Waldeck the way it is now, Farley said: “No, not the way it is right now, but what they’ve giving me [as] a picture of the future, it looks like it could be better.”

Beyond the finances, it’s unclear what other kind of role hospitals could have in housing. At Waldeck, advocates are still working on the important questions: Will there be a clinician on site? Will Fair Housing law permit patients from certain hospitals to get to the front of the housing wait list? And what kind of assistance will be available to the residents, many of whom struggle with substance and mental health issues?

“I want it to look just as handsome on the inside as it looks on the outside,” said Codman Square NDC Executive Director Gail Latimore. “I want the residents to feel like they have an ownership stake in the property…. I want the residents to actually be healthier as a result.”

This article was published on June 13 on the website of WBUR 90.9 FM, Boston’s NPR News Station. The Reporter and WBUR have a partnership in which the two news organizations share resources and collaborate on stories.