Profiles of Housing and Neighborhood Contexts among Low-Income Families: Links with Children's Well-Being

AbstractLow-income families face numerous constraints but also opportunities in accessing affordable, decent, and stable housing in safe neighborhoods. These factors, in combination with individual preferences and priorities, lead to a diverse array of housing experiences. This study assessed the housing and neighborhood profiles of a representative sample of low-income families with children living in high-poverty urban neighborhoods in Boston, Chicago, and San Antonio (N = 2,393). Latent class analyses delineated four profiles of housing and neighborhood characteristics with distinct patterns of housing cost, housing problems, neighborhood disorder, residential instability, and homeowner ship. Profile 1 featured high cost, high housing and neighborhood problems, moderate residential instability, and high private rentals; Profile 2 featured high cost, low housing problems and neighborhood disorder, moderate residential instability, and prevalent owned homes and private rentals; Profile 3 featured low cost, and high housing problems, neighborhood disorder, residential stability, and assisted housing; and Profile 4 featured low cost, low housing problems and neighborhood disorder, high residential instability, and high assisted housing. Maternal, family, and broader community characteristics varied across these profiles, suggesting the endogeneity between families and their housing and neighborhood contexts. Individual fixed-effects regression models found that housing and neighborhood profiles were associated with children's functioning, with the primary pattern indicating that Profile 2 was associated with superior reading skills and fewer emotional and behavioral problems among children than other housing and neighborhood profiles. The results highlight the importance of assessingfamilies' holistic bundle of housing and neighborhood characteristics rather than attempting to isolate unique effects of characteristics that are inherently interrelated.BackgroundThe recent housing crisis focused new attention on housing and neighborhoods as central contexts for children's healthy growth and development. Although various characteristics of housing (for example, quality and homeownership) have received notable scholarly and policy attention in relation to children's development (Newman, 2008), insufficient previous research has addressed the interrelated nature of the housing and neighborhood characteristics that low-income urban families experience. This article investigates the multifaceted nature of low-income families' housing and neighborhood contexts. It adds to existing literature by assessing how multiple aspects of housing and neighborhood characteristics bundle together into distinct patterns, which we term housing and neighborhood "profiles. " After establishing the existence of such profiles empirically through advanced person-based analytic techniques in a representative sample of low-income families, we explore the associations of these profiles with children's functioning, adjusting for factors that differentially select families into housing and neighborhood contexts and hence might bias measured associations with child functioning.This study is based on developmental contextual theory, which argues that proximal contexts, such as homes and neighborhoods, are inextricably linked to human development (Bronfenbrenner and Morris, 1998). We draw more specifically from the developing ecobiodevelopmental (Shonkoff, 2010; Shonkoff and Gamer, 2012) and chaotic systems (Bronfenbrenner and Evans, 2000; Evans and Kim, 2013) frameworks that highlight the harmful role that disorder and instability in children's housing and neighborhood contexts play in limiting their growth and development. These models argue that in comparison to their peers, children who experience more environmental chaos, disorder, stress, and instability in their housing and neighborhood contexts will show greater biological and physiological deficits that will translate into less advanced cognitive, behavioral, and emotional functioning. …