If These Walls Could Talk: An Exploration into the Effects of Housing on Child Well-being

Abstract

Though the Housing Act of 1948 outlawed racial discrimination in the housing market, it did not undo the effects of the earlier policy. It only formally shielded against future wrongs. Racial segregation persists in the U.S. today, and this paper seeks to contribute to that body of literature that helps unveil the implications of America’s tragic past as it relates to housing policy. I offer a brief overview of some of the salient policies and regulations pertaining to housing following the Great Depression. I choose this point in history to analyze housing policy because it is the first time the U.S. government chooses to formally act on a national scale to address the nation’s problems regarding housing. What ensued proved to be decades of racially discriminatory practices explicitly and implicitly sanctioned by the U.S. Federal government. The contemporary American housing landscape and its associated characteristics are, in part, products of these times. Though there are many dimensions of inequality that spawn from discriminatory housing, I focus on health; and thus, following this chapter, I review literature from sociology and psychology relating to socioeconomic status and health. These readings reveal that socioeconomic status and health are intricately related, and that as one’s experience of inequality increases, so does his likelihood to develop illness. The second set of literature focuses explicitly on housing’s effect on health and educational achievement. These papers argue that housing acts as a mediating variable connecting socioeconomic status to health and educational achievement. Via factors like crowding and the interior structural quality of the individual family unit, researchers show that housing affects human health independent of socioeconomic status. This paper extends this research, and mainly seeks to understand the effects of housing on child psychological and cognitive well-being. It does so by analyzing panel data from the Panel Study for Income Dynamics dataset. By running two regression models: fixed effects and random effects, I evaluate the effects of crowding, home ownership, recent mobility, house type, and interior structure on child psychological and cognitive wellbeing. The results are inconclusive as some housing factors show effects in either model, but only one—interior monotony—shows a significant effect in both. But even still, this effect related to just on psychological health measure. In the end, the findings of this paper challenge some of the findings of related research and thus to encourage further research into the subject. Policymakers must reflect the lack of consensus in the research and act cautiously when relates to crafting housing policy. Inaction is not option as the implications of discriminatory policy remain today.