Report Publish Date: September 1, 2022
This research paper describes the impact of Massachusetts’ Chapter 40B affordable housing policy on the health of infants and birthing parents.
The author finds that moving to 40B rental housing has the following positive effects on birth outcomes, the birthing parent’s health, and access to healthcare during pregnancy, when compared to moving to non-subsidized rental housing:
The author found that 40B’s average effect on birth weight was about three times more than the effect of using the WIC nutrition program during pregnancy.
We know very little about whether and how housing policies that aim to reverse segregation and neighborhood disparities affect the health of people from low-income households. The author of this paper focuses on Massachusetts Chapter 40B, a civil-rights era policy that sets aside housing for low- to middle-income households in high income areas. The author wanted to know whether moving to 40B rental housing or buying and moving into a 40B home affected the health of pregnant people and their babies.
The author used a novel dataset she created—based on the Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development’s subsidized housing inventory—to identify buildings permitted under 40B. She linked the addresses to a consumer database containing the history of residential addresses in Massachusetts and constructed a longitudinal dataset of 40B beneficiaries and their address histories. Her analysis focused on 31,776 female renters and 5,532 female homeowners. She used GIS data to determine neighborhood characteristics of addresses. She also constructed two comparison groups: People who benefited from the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit and people who did not benefit from either 40B or the tax credit program.
“[E]ffects on birth outcomes among renters are driven primarily by birthing people who move from higher-poverty, higher-incarceration areas, and areas with more Black, Hispanic, Asian and other non-white residents.
—Noémie Sportiche, Harvard University
“Taken together, these results suggest that housing policies aimed at increasing the supply of affordable housing in high-income areas may be important tools for reducing racial and economic disparities in early-life health but not necessarily in adult health,” the author writes.
$249,267
Awarded on: 11/23/2020
Timeframe: 2020-2025
Grant number: 78165
Location: Cambridge, MA
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. I use a difference-in-differences approach that compares the health outcomes of infants born to birthing people who move to 40B housing to those of infants born to demographically matched birthing people who move from similar origin neighborhoods to non-subsidized housing. Using this method, I find that moving to 40B housing produces meaningful improvements in birth outcomes and marginal gains in birthing parents’ health among 40B renters. I find no evidence of effects for 40B owners. Improvements in birth outcomes among renters 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.
Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, September 2022
Evidence From Bypassing Exclusionary Zoning Under Massachusetts Chapter 40B
This article looks at the impact of Chapter 40B, a Massachusetts policy that aims to get around restrictive zoning practices and make it easier for people from low- and moderate-income households to move into higher-income neighborhoods that offer more social mobility.
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