Housing is one of the most important — and often overlooked — factors shaping health. Poor-quality housing can expose residents to hazards such as mold, pests, and extreme temperatures, while stable, affordable housing can provide a foundation for healthy development. Yet despite its importance, researchers still know surprisingly little about how access to high-quality housing early in life influences health decades later.

A new study led by University of Minnesota School of Public Health (SPH) Associate Professor Andrew Fenelon aims to help answer that question by examining the long-term effects of living in the United States’ early public housing program, a period when public housing was well-funded, well-maintained and widely regarded as high-quality housing.

Fenelon said the project, funded by the National Institutes of Health, will focus on people who lived in public housing in the 1940s and 1950s. “The public housing program of the 1940s and 1950s was a major public investment that provided high-quality, affordable housing to many working- and middle-class families,” said Fenelon. “By following residents over the course of their lives, we can better understand whether those early housing investments produced lasting benefits for health and well-being.”

The research team identified approximately 100,000 public housing residents in the 1940 U.S. Census and will create a companion dataset using the 1950 Census. Researchers will then link those records to a range of later-life data sources, including census, tax, and mortality records, creating one of the most comprehensive datasets ever assembled to examine the long-term effects of housing on health, economic opportunity, and aging.

The study will compare people who lived in public housing with matched individuals living in nearby neighborhoods and elsewhere in the same cities. Researchers will also analyze outcomes separately for Black and white residents, exploring how housing discrimination and residential segregation may have influenced the long-term benefits of public housing.

“At a time when access to affordable housing remains a critical issue across the U.S., this research will help us understand whether investments in affordable housing can produce health and other benefits that last throughout people’s lives,” said Fenelon. “It will also allow us to examine whether those benefits were experienced equally across populations, given the profound effects of housing discrimination and residential segregation on opportunities for many families.”

The research team includes an interdisciplinary group of demographers, sociologists, geographers, urban planners, health services researchers, and epidemiologists from the University of Minnesota, the University of Maryland, Michigan State University, the University of Chicago, and Columbia University.