Health and employment among young adults receiving federal housing assistance

ABSTRACTSince the 1980s, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has implemented various “self-sufficiency” demonstrations aimed at supporting employment among federal housing assistance clients. A concern associated with these demonstrations is that adults in poor health will be either excluded from these programs or penalized for not meeting program directives to obtain employment. This concern speaks to the ongoing debate about the importance of work barriers—such as poor health—compared to programmatic work disincentives—such as basing rents on income—in shaping the employment outcomes of HUD clients. We advance this debate through a detailed analysis of the relationship between specific health conditions and employment among a sample of young adult HUD clients. Using a novel dataset and quasi-experimental research design, we find that depression, anxiety, hypertension, and diabetes are prevalent conditions among our sample of HUD clients. We further find that depression and hypertension are significant predictors of non-employment, though depression is only significant among HUD clients and not the entire matched sample. We find no evidence that HUD assistance creates a work disincentive. Our results therefore support the narrative that work barriers such as poor health may create a barrier to employment for HUD clients, many of whom may require specialized health and supportive services to obtain employment.KEYWORDS: Affordable housingemploymentpovertyurban health Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThis research uses data from Add Health, funded by grant [P01 HD31921] (Harris) from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Add Health is currently directed by Robert A. Hummer and funded by the National Institute on Aging cooperative agreements [U01 AG071448 (Hummer) and U01AG071450 (Aiello and Hummer)] at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Add Health was designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Notes on contributorsAtticus JaramilloAtticus Jaramillo is an assistant professor in the School of Landscape Architecture and Planning at the University of Arizona. His work explores how housing policies and programs shape the neighborhood, health, and economic outcomes of low-income adults and children. Other works by Dr. Jaramillo can be found in Journal of the American Planning Association, Housing Policy Debate, Cityscape, and The Social Science Journal.William M. RoheWilliam M. Rohe is a research professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Rohe is co-author of Planning with Neighborhoods (University of North Carolina Press), co-editor of Chasing the American Dream: New Perspectives on Affordable Homeownership (Cornell University Press) and author of The Research Triangle: From Tobacco Road to Global Prominence (University of Pennsylvania Press). He has also published over 70 referred journal articles on the topics of housing and community development policy and practice, as well as numerous research reports for federal, state, and local government agencies and major foundations.