The housing tenure gradient of mental health in the United Kingdom after the Global Financial Crisis

Abstract

There exists an established housing tenure gradient of mental health across many contexts and time periods: outright homeowners fare the best and renters the worst. It is unclear nevertheless how stable this gradient is within a same context over time, and how major shocks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, affect it. I use post Global Financial Crisis (GFC) data from the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study to investigate how the gradient across four housing tenure categories (outright homeowners, mortgagors, private renters and social renters) evolves over time. I find a generalised worsening in reported mental health after 2015, but that the ordering of the tenure categories is qualitatively unaltered over time: outright homeowners fare the best across the entire period, followed by mortgagors, private renters and social renters. This notwithstanding, the difference between private and social renters becomes indistinguishable from 0 during the pandemic period. The results suggest that while the overall housing tenure gradient of mental health is persistent enough to remain largely unchanged over time and even after a major event such as the COVID-19 pandemic, some tenures may be more sensitive than others to external shocks and to the related policy responses.