Housing Disorder and Adult Physical Health Outcomes Across Age Gradients: A Longitudinal Panel Analysis
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Communities across the U.S. face growing challenges in meeting the housing needs of Americans, with limited supply and high costs leading many to live in unsuitable and poorly kept housing contexts (Joint Center for Housing Studies, 2024). These challenges are particularly acute among low-income households, and among younger and older adults, who have more limited social and economic resources (Airgood-Obrycki et al., 2024). Indeed, recent national data from the American Housing Survey indicate that 12% of the low-income renter households reside in housing of substandard quality, experiencing physical problems such as lack of heat or hot water, water leaks and mold, or rodent infestations (Joint Center for Housing Studies, 2024), with residents of public housing, which has faced decades of underinvestment, facing particular challenges. Housing is a central social determinant of health, with unaffordable, poor-quality, and unstable housing negatively associated with a range of health and wellbeing outcomes (D'Alessandro & Appollini, 2020; Howden-Chapman et al., 2023; Rolfe et al., 2020; Swope & Hernández, 2019). Yet prior work on housing quality often focused on specific aspects of housing disorder and on narrow aspects of health (Krieger & Higgins, 2002) or dichotomized or categorized composites of housing disorder (Adamkiewicz et al., 2014; Troxel et al., 2020), and have suffer from concerns over unmeasured heterogeneity bias. To address these limitations, we will examine both a broad array of housing disorder features as well as a range of general, chronic, and behavioral aspects of physical health in a sample of adults sharing a single neighborhood context and controlled housing affordability, and will address variation over age strata.
Language: English
Subfield: Health
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7127447217