Desegregation-focused housing policies aimed at reducing disparities in neighborhood conditions may also reduce disparities in health outcomes. This paper examines the effects of one such policy on the health of pregnant people and their newborn infants. Specifically, I study the impact of Massachusetts Chapter 40B, a major civil rights-era housing policy that increases the supply of affordable ownership and rental housing in higher-income areas to facilitate moves for lower-income households to those areas. Using a difference-in-differences approach that compares the health outcomes of birthing parents who move to 40B housing to those of demographically-matched birthing parents who move from similar origin neighborhoods, I find that moving to 40B housing produces meaningful improvements in birth outcomes and marginal gains in birthing parents health only among 40B renters. I find no evidence of health effects among 40B owners. Among renters, improvements in birth outcomes are driven largely by people moving from neighborhoods with higher levels of poverty, more Black and Hispanic residents, and higher male incarceration rates. These results suggest that affordable housing policies like 40B can help reduce racial and economic disparities in early-life health among certain populations.

This paper examines the effect of the Great Recession of 2007-2009 on the mental health of older adults, using longitudinal Health and Retirement Study data linked to area-level data on house prices. We use a variety of measures to capture mental health and rely on the very large cross-sectional variation in falling house prices to identify the impact of the Great Recession on those outcomes. We also account for people who moved in response to falling prices by fixing each person’s location immediately prior to the house price collapse. Our central finding is that the Great Recession had heterogeneous effects on health. While mental health was not affected for the average older adult, mental health declined among homeowners with few financial assets, who were therefore more vulnerable to falling house prices. Importantly, health impacts in this group differed by race and ethnicity: depression and functional limitations worsened among Black and other non-white homeowners and medication use increased among white homeowners. There were no measurable impacts for Hispanic homeowners. These results highlight the importance of examining heterogeneity across multiple dimensions when examining the health impacts of economic conditions.

Opening up neighborhoods that offer greater opportunities for social mobility to low-and moderate-income households remains a challenge in the United States. Exclusionary zoning practices act as a barrier to current efforts by restricting the supply of affordable housing. In this paper, we examine whether fair share policies which seek to bypass these restrictive zoning practices offer a potential solution. Focusing on Massachusetts Chapter 40B, we find clear evidence that such policies expand the types of neighborhoods currently available to low- and moderate-income households. Leveraging novel data on 40B development addresses linked to a wide range of public and administrative records, we find that 40B residents live in neighborhoods with greater economic mobility, higher performing schools, greater social capital, less pollution, better health outcomes, and lower incarceration rates than both the typical Massachusetts resident and the beneficiaries of the state's Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, Housing Choice Voucher, and Public Housing programs. Consistent with previous research on policies that have segregated affordable housing and opportunity, we also find that 40B neighborhoods are substantially whiter and more affluent than both types of comparison areas. Differences on measures associated with economic mobility between 40B neighborhoods and those with other program beneficiaries are strikingly large. An examination of underlying policy mechanisms suggests that bypassing exclusionary zoning plays a central role in explaining these differences in neighborhood conditions.

An increasing number of jurisdictions are passing regulations to allow for denser housing in high-income areas. This paper examines how local house prices and existing residents–who are often strongly opposed to these policies–react to this new construction. We focus on housing constructed under Chapter 40B, a Massachusetts state policy that requires all municipalities to maintain a minimum proportion of affordable housing and allows developers to bypass local zoning regulations if those minimums are not met. Using a difference-in-differences design that compares housing located near 40B developments to housing located slightly farther away paired with rich individual-level data, we provide two sets of results. First, large 40B developments lead to substantial decreases in nearby house prices, while smaller developments do not affect prices. Second, nearby residents respond by moving out at higher rates after large 40B developments are constructed, although we do not observe any significant changes in existing residents’ political participation at the state or federal level.