Housing and health needs of affordable housing lottery applicants in Boston, Massachusetts

Housing conditions have been associated with multiple dimensions of health, including mental health, respiratory health, injuries, and well-being. Although the scope of research on housing and health is wide, experimental... [ view full abstract ]

Housing conditions have been associated with multiple dimensions of health, including mental health, respiratory health, injuries, and well-being. Although the scope of research on housing and health is wide, experimental evidence is lacking. Reviews of existing literature indicate that few housing-related randomized control trials have been implemented, and interventions that are evaluated tend to address single issue improvements rather than full-scale, comprehensive improvements to living conditions. ‘Green’ and healthy low-income housing sites, however, offer opportunities to bundle many of the improvements which reduce environmental exposures, improve social environments and improve quality of life.
This paper describes a collaboration to understand the housing and health needs of applicants to an income-restricted affordable housing lottery in Boston’s Chinatown. The lottery allocated affordable rental units located in a new 'green' development that was designed to provide residents with: 1) high indoor air quality, through design features such as air filtration systems, a smoking ban, and green building choices; 2) accessibility both inside the development and to the rest of the city through good connections to public transit, retail, and public space; and 3) a positive social environment, cultivated through neighborhood-sensitive design that comes from a 12-year, community-based planning process.
Working with Chinatown's community development corporation, we constructed a survey instrument in 2014 to measure housing conditions and health status, and piloted tested the survey with Chinatown residents the same year. The lottery to assign 95 affordable units took place over the summer of 2015, and had nearly 4,000 applicants. Baseline data collection on lottery winners and 300 waitlisted applicants is expected to begin in 2016. This paper will provide descriptive statistics on health status and housing conditions among surveyed applicants, and will discuss the implications of our baseline comparisons for understand the usefulness in collecting post-randomization data in quasi-experimental settings.