Seeking the Principles of Power and Danger

New paper , with Ang Li and others, offering a framework for thinking how climate change, housing, and health intersect. The abstract: Anthropogenic climate change is causing rapid shifts in temperature and weather patterns, both in location and intensity, making living conditions increasingly hazardous. This complicates housing's frontline role in protecting human health. When housing systems fail to provide universal access to secure, affordable, and suitable housing, social and health inequalities related to climate change are amplified. The location, construction, and operation of homes influence greenhouse gas emissions and must be improved to reduce their environmental impacts. This paper, the second in a Series on housing as a social determinant of health, builds a framework for conceptualising the interactions between housing, climate, and health. It identifies the pathways through which climate change affects housing and exacerbates health risks,...

New paper by  Ang Li , Emma Baker, and Rebecca Bentley has been published in Social Science and Medicine , looking at how stable and secure tenancy affects the mental health and level of psychological distress of private renters compared to home owners. The results suggest that stability helps to close the mental health gap between those two groups by increasing renters well being at a faster rate overtime. This is interesting to me for two reasons: 1) it suggests that ontological security is more important than tenure type. It isn't necessarily homeownership that is protective of mental health. 2) it underscores the relationship between housing and mental health, and that the rights of tenants should be considered a public health issue.  Here is the abstract for ' Understanding the mental health effects of instability in the private rental sector: A longitudinal analysis of a national cohort ':  Using a population-based longitudinal dataset in Australia ov...

New paper by Ang Li (and co-authors Kadir Atalay & Stephen Whelan from the University of Sydney) looks at the effect of house price increases on renters and homeowners fertility intentions and fertility outcomes in Australia.  Housing affordability has been a big issue in Australia for some time and the impact of decreasing affordability has been linked to declining fertility rates. Atalay, Li and Whelan using data from the HILDA survey find that increasing house prices have different effects for homeowners and renters. Here is the abstract:  There is increasing evidence that housing and housing markets impact a variety of behaviors and outcomes. Using a rich panel of Australian microlevel data, we estimated the effect of housing price changes on both fertility intentions and fertility outcomes. The analysis indicates that the likelihood of having a child among homeowners is positively related to an increase in housing wealth. The positive housing wealth effect has t...