QUALITY OF LIFE
Owning a home in the US linked to longer life
Dr Casey Breen, Senior Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science and Department of Sociology, conducted the study, published today in Demography.
The study found that homeownership was associated with 0.36 years of additional life expectancy for Black male Americans who were born in the early twentieth century, and 0.42 years for their White counterparts.
Dr Casey Breen said ‘My study finds homeownership has a meaningful positive impact on life expectancy. These results suggest that social policies that equitably expand homeownership opportunities for Black Americans may help narrow the gap between Black and White male life expectancy in the US.’
According to the study, expanding homeownership opportunities for racial minorities could help mitigate the profound racial disparities in mortality the US is currently experiencing. The study also highlights significant disparities in homeownership rates in the twentieth century, with White Americans being almost twice as likely to own a house than Black Americans. Due to systemic historical issues such as slavery and racism, Black Americans had far fewer opportunities to own their home in 1940 with fewer than 10% doing so between the ages of 18–25 in 1940, and only 40% over the age of 65 owning their homes.
Using data from the 1920 and 1940 census records that were linked to social security mortality records, and a sibling-based identification strategy, the study was able to analyse the different outcomes in life expectancy for American male adults owning a home between the ages of 24 and 35.
While owning a home as opposed to renting can help in the accumulation of wealth, and is associated with better health and living longer, the study found that the property’s value had very little impact on life expectancy. The study also discusses other reasons for this increase in life expectancy for homeowners including a stronger social community, the psychological benefits of homeownership, and better living conditions.
Dr Casey Breen said ‘This study also shows that there is a meaningful, statistically significant difference in life expectancy between Americans owning their home and those who rent, with homeowners in early adulthood living approximately six months longer at age 65 than those who rent.’
The study controlled for factors such as education attainment, race, income, marital status, and shared family background to provide a snapshot of how US homeownership affected life expectancy in the twentieth century. However, it is important to note that the sample was restricted in terms of gender, ethnicity, nationality and historical context, and is unlikely to be representative of other populations.
Editor’s notes
The full paper, ‘The Longevity Benefits of Homeownership: Evidence from Early 20th-Century U.S. Male Birth Cohorts’, is under embargo until 09:00 ET (14:00 GMT) on Wednesday 4 December 2024 and will be published in Demography at https://doi.org/10.1215/00703370-11680975 and available at https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/advance-publication
For more information, interviews and a copy of the paper under embargo, please contact the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science’s Media and Communications Officer Bradley Hall-Smith (LCDS.Media@demography.ox.ac.uk) and the study author Dr Casey Breen (casey.breen@demography.ox.ac.uk)
About the University of Oxford’s Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science
Based at Oxford Population Health, the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science and Demographic Science Unit are at the forefront of demographic research, disrupting and realigning demography for the benefit of populations around the world. Focussing on inequality, family, biosocial, digital, geospatial, and computational research, our researchers use new types of data, methods and unconventional approaches to tackle the most challenging demographic and population problems of our time.
About the University of Oxford’s Department of Sociology
Oxford Sociology is at the forefront of ground-breaking empirical research which spans the full spectrum of the social world. We apply a diverse range of rigorous methods to real-world issues in order to address the most pressing societal challenges of our times. Our commitment to collaborative research ensures that our researchers have the freedom to transcend disciplinary boundaries, foster international partnerships, and explore innovative research. Our research themes include demography, life course research, political sociology and social movements, social inequality, gender and the family, cybercrime and justice, international comparative research, and computational social science.
Journal
Demography
Method of Research
Data/statistical analysis
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
The Longevity Benefits of Homeownership: Evidence from Early 20th-Century U.S. Male Birth Cohorts
Article Publication Date
4-Dec-2024
Poor health outcomes—including early deaths—linger for decades for those who lived in ‘redlined’ neighborhoods
New study of nearly 962,000 people who lived in segregated communities in 1940 is first to link redlining with individual risk of death
Texas A&M University
Redlining—a mid-20th-century federal government practice of denying home loans in African American and other minority neighborhoods—has long been associated with poor health outcomes, including disparate overall mortality rates among racial and ethnic groups.
The term gets its name from the practice by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC, operational from 1933 to 1954) of color-coding maps based on each neighborhood’s level of mortgage creditworthiness, with A being the most creditworthy and D—noted with a red line—the least.
Now, a new study led by a researcher with the Texas A&M University School of Public Health has, for the first time, also identified an association between redlining and an increased risk of death later in life among individuals who experienced the now-defunct practice in 1940.
“Other studies have associated redlining with aggregate mortality rates, but our study has the advantage of using a very large sample size from across the entire country, which allowed us to determine if there was an association with individual risk of death,” said Sebastian Linde, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management, who led the study.
For their research, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, Linde and a colleague at the University at Buffalo linked the age of death of 961,719 individuals who lived in redlined neighborhoods in 1940 with their age of death as listed in Social Security Numident data. The neighborhoods were in 30 of the nation’s largest cities.
“We found that these individuals, on average, were 19.2 years old in 1940 and, on average, died at 76.8 years old,” Linde said. “When the statistical model was adjusted for sex, race and ethnicity and any effects that could occur long after exposure to redlined neighborhoods, we found that each one-unit lower HOLC ranking—such as from an A to a B—was associated with an 8 percent likelihood of increased risk of death.”
In addition, at age 65, individuals residing within D (redlined) neighborhoods on average died about 1.44 years sooner than those who lived within the highest-graded areas.
Linde said that although redlining was made illegal with the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the historic HOLC maps continue to be associated with health and mortality outcomes because the results of investment decisions that supported racial segregation at the time still linger today.
In addition, the practice was one of several that reinforced racial segregation, such as zoning laws that prevented the construction of affordable housing in suburban neighborhoods and the reluctance of the Federal Housing Administration to provide mortgage insurance within majority racial and ethnic minority communities.
“The forces behind housing development and access are complex and multilayered, so we cannot claim that HOLC redlining alone led to the associations we found,” Linde said. “Instead, the results might more accurately be seen as the product of larger public and private forces that were effectively encoded in the HOLC maps.”
In addition, Linde noted that the results should be interpreted as associations rather than causes and effects because he and his colleague used an observational study design and thus did not carry out any interventions to alter an outcome.
Still, Linde said the results underscore the lingering effects of systemic discrimination, and policymakers might want to target the mechanisms through which now-illegal structural inequalities continue to affect human health and well-being today.
By Ann Kellett, Texas A&M University School of Public Health
Journal
JAMA Internal Medicine
Method of Research
Data/statistical analysis
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
Individual-Level Exposure to Residential Redlining in 1940 and Mortality Risk
COI Statement
Dr Egede reported receiving grants from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) (R01DK118038, R01DK120861) and National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) (R01MD013826, R01MD018012, R01MD017574) during the conduct of the study. No other disclosures were reported.
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