Housing Tenure and Youth Trajectories of Mental Health in Canada

We take a novel approach to estimating the association between housing tenure and youth mental health by considering stability and change in exposure. We categorize youth from age 10–15 into mutually exclusive groups: always rent or own—stable patterns; intermittently rent, or own—changing patterns. We use growth modeling to compare trajectories of aggression and emotional problems among children in families who always or intermittently rent to their counterparts who always own. We observe initial disparities in problems with aggression at age 10–11 between youth who have always lived in rented vs. owned housing that persist over time, resulting in comparable disparities at age 14–15.