Bricks and behavior: The repair and maintenance costs of housing for persons with mental illness

Comprehensive data on 153 properties offering independent living for person s with mental illness are used to examine the effects on repair and mainten ance (RM) costs of building quality, neighborhood quality, building size, p roportion of tenants with mental illness, and management experience with me ntally ill tenants. We find an inverted U-shaped relationship between the p roportion of mentally ill tenants in a building and its RM costs, which sug gests favorable behavioral effects on mentally ill tenants of living in the same building with others who are mentally ill. We also find amenity featu res are associated with higher RM costs in properties where more tenants ar e mentally ill.