According to the latest housing report from the Resolution Foundation, which used Understanding Society’s COVID-19 data, – age, income and ethnicity affected the quality of homes that people have been occupying during lockdown.
Key findings
- Younger age groups have spent lockdown in considerably poorer housing conditions than those in older age brackets. Young people have less space, are more likely to live in a damp home, are more likely to have no garden, or to live in a derelict or congested neighbourhood than older generations.
- Within age groups, income and ethnicity are strongly corelated with housing quality. The average low-income 55-64-year-old is more likely to contend with damp, or to live in a problematic neighbourhood, than the average 25-34-year-old in the highest income bracket. And on average, those aged 55 and older from BAME backgrounds occupy homes with 30 percent less useable space than their white counterparts.
- One-in-five children from a low-income household has spent lockdown in an overcrowded home, while close to 10 percent are growing up in damp conditions. Nearly 40 percent of under-16s from BAME groups have no obvious garden, and one-quarter live in an objectively poor-quality environment.
- While housing quality has generally improved over time, overcrowding has increased. This is an especially pronounced problem for those with dependent children.
- The private-rented sector (PRS) is the tenure with the poorest record on damp (8 percent of properties), while the social-rented sector contains the largest proportion of households living in overcrowded conditions (16 percent). The structural shift, whereby many more young people and families with children live in the PRS today than in the past, has played a large role in widening intergenerational gaps in living conditions.
Housing conditions have had a stronger effect on well-being during the pandemic. Even after controlling for key characteristics such as pay and relationship status, the well-being gap between renters and owners has widened over the lockdown period.
The researchers said in the report, “Decent living conditions are not just a ‘nice to have’: they have a profound influence on outcomes including well-being, an effect this note shows has been amplified during the lockdown period. Moreover, the inequalities in living conditions we document here are far from natural. Instead, they are the product of long-run housing trends such as tenure change, lack of building and insufficient regulation of privately rented homes.”
Covid 19Family and households
