Vulnerable people, precarious housing, and regional resilience: an exploratory analysis

Abstract

This article has two purposes. First, it explores the ideas of vulnerability, precariousness, and resilience as they apply to people, housing, neighborhoods, and metropolitan areas. People might be more vulnerable to shocks or strains, we propose, if they are members of racial/ethnic minorities, recent immigrants, non-high school graduates, are children or over 75 years old, disabled, recent veterans, living in poverty, or living in single-parent households. Housing may be more precarious, we propose, when it is rented, multi-family, manufactured, crowded, or subject to overpayment. The article goes on to document the relationships between potential personal or household vulnerability and potentially precarious housing conditions. Microdata from the 2005–2007 American Community Survey suggest that an important minority of people have multiple vulnerabilities; these vulnerabilities associate with residence in precarious housing. We suggest that policy be directed toward precarious situations most likely to afflict the most vulnerable populations, especially single-parent households and immigrants.

Keywords:

• populations
• demographics
• housing
• data

Notes

¹Renter estimates include mobile homes; owner-occupied estimates omit mobile homes because certain data on costs are missing for owner-occupied mobile homes.

²Recent immigrants in the South and Northwest are less likely than non-recent immigrants to live in old housing. But immigrants in the most populous regions (Greater Los Angeles, Norfolk-Boston, Great Lakes, and Florida) are more likely than other people to live in old housing, and the number of both immigrants and old units is large in these three regions.

³This unexpected result suggests that households make tenure decisions first based on their income, but that when low income households decide to buy a house they are extremely likely to pay more than 35 percent of their incomes to do so, at least in 2005–2007.