Housing strategies to strengthen families

How does housing impact family well-being?

Residential stability supports employment stability. ¹

Adults experiencing a residential crisis are more likely to be late for or miss work. Forced relocations are correlated with higher levels of job loss.

Residential stability contributes to children’s healthy development. ²

Children experiencing residential instability demonstrate worse academic and social outcomes than their residentially stable peers, such as lower vocabulary skills, grade retention, increased high school drop-out rates, and lower adult educational attainment.

Children thrive in stable, predictable household environments. ³

Frequent or abrupt moves often produce chaotic household environments. For children, household chaos has been found to predict poor attention skills, learning difficulties, difficulty with delayed gratification, less receptive vocabulary skills, lower IQ scores, and lower ability to process social cues.

Stable schooling and childcare arrangements produce better outcomes for children. ⁴

Multiple forced moves often cause children and families to change schools or childcare providers, which can hamper child development, academic progress, and social skills.

Safe, healthy housing is positively associated with children’s development and family well-being. ⁵

Insufficient home insulation, the absence of hot water, pest infestation, mold, inadequate ventilation, and other environmental factors in homes are associated with greater incidences of infectious diseases, chronic illnesses, injuries, poor nutrition, mental disorders, and cognitive development issues.

Moving to better housing or a higher opportunity neighborhood improves lifetime outcomes for children. ⁶

Lower-income children are more likely to experience upward economic mobility if they grow up in areas with less concentrated poverty, better schools, a large share of two-parent families, and lower crime rates. The earlier children move to a higher opportunity neighborhood, the stronger the positive effects.