What are the impacts of living in social housing? New evidence from Australia

In this paper, we apply statistical matching methods to a national longitudinal dataset of Australians facing housing insecurity to estimate the impacts of social housing on employment, education, health, incarceration and homelessness. We find social housing in Australia provides an important `safety net’ protecting people from homelessness. However, at least in the short run, individuals in social housing have similar outcomes in terms of employment, education, physical and mental health, and incarceration to other comparable individuals not in social housing. These are the first estimates of causal impacts of social housing, simultaneously estimating impacts on a range of shelter and non-shelter outcomes highlighted as important by the broader social housing literature. They also provide an interesting contrast with the existing US estimates. These results are potentially due to strict targeting of individuals into social housing and that they represent the average effect across individuals who may experience substantially different impacts.