Social inequality, population health, and housing: a study of two Vancouver neighborhoods

An emerging 'population health' framework for understanding inequalities in health identifies the structure of social relations as a crucial factor in shaping human health and well-being. However, there remain many unanswered questions about the mechanisms through which social relations might shape the health status of individuals and populations. Housing plays a central r ole in routinized, everyday life and is fundamentally bound up in one's sen se of control over life circumstances. Housing and property markets are sig nificant in the distribution of wealth and are an important arena for the e xercise of power relations. Housing circumstance is crucial in the producti on and reproduction of social identity and social status. Yet little has be en written on the influence of inequalities generated by housing and housin g markets on the differential distribution of health status. This paper rep orts the findings of an empirical study of relationships between socioecono mic status, material and meaningful dimensions of housing and home, and hea lth status. Our objective is to investigate ways in which material and mean ingful factors related to housing, in conjunction with other dimensions of the social environment, could operate to produce systematic inequalities in health status across social strata. The data for this study were obtained through a mailed survey of residents in the Mount Pleasant (n = 322) and Su nset (n = 206) neighborhoods of Vancouver, Canada. They suggest that, in co ncert with commonly used measures of socioeconomic status, both material an d meaningful dimensions of housing and home are associated with health stat us in a direction consistent with expectations following from our analytica l model. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.