Purpose
We explore the impact of social housing on people’s wellbeing and find that generally people’s housing conditions and overall sense of life satisfaction improve as they move into social housing. This analysis builds upon our earlier exploratory work [PDF, 1.3 MB] by adding an extra year of survey data and by improving the rate at which administrative records are successfully linked to survey responses. Wellbeing outcomes for people before and after placement in social housing are then assessed.
Methodology
At the core of this analysis is the construction of synthetic estimates of the change in wellbeing associated with placing someone in social housing. These synthetic estimates are developed by bringing together the panel data on housing applications and placements from the HNZ Social Housing Dataset with the cross-sectional observations of wellbeing outcomes contained in the NZGSS. This enables us to leverage the strengths of each dataset to obtain an estimate of the average change in wellbeing outcomes associated with placement in social housing.
Key Results
Obtaining evidence of the impact of social housing on client outcomes is challenging. Administrative records focus on service usage rather than wellbeing outcomes, while the main survey datasets containing good outcome measures are cross-sectional in nature and cannot easily capture individual transitions. The synthetic transitions approach examined here goes some way to addressing these limits by leveraging off the respective strengths of both types of data.
The key results from a synthetic transition analysis of placement in social housing is clear: housing quality is better for people post-placement. Although in one sense unsurprising, this result is in stark contrast to the picture that emerges from a simple descriptive look at the relationship between housing outcomes and tenure status using the same source datasets, where social housing scores worst on all housing quality measures. There is also evidence that the overall life satisfaction of people placed in social housing is higher post-placement than before.
The main findings discussed above are robust to controls for demographic differences in the before and after samples. This provides relatively weak evidence for a large causal impact from social housing placement to mould, crowding, and life satisfaction. However, stronger causal inference runs up against the limits of the sample size and dataset. It is also important to note that any effects on wellbeing occurring post-transition but as a result of placement in social housing (such as gradual improvements to health status) are not captured by this methodology.
More generally, the use of linked survey and administrative data to generate synthetic transitions adds a useful tool to the toolkit for programme evaluation. In one sense, the social housing example investigated here should be a powerful example of the utility of the approach. The number of people placed in social housing each year in New Zealand is such that the synthetic transition sample is low for meaningful quantitative analysis using such linking to the NZGSS.