Housing tenure, body mass index and health in Australia

Abstract

A national survey of Australian adults shows higher levels of obesity among public housing tenants and home owners with a mortgage compared to outright home owners. These results are to an extent due to higher instances of illness and disability among public housing tenants, and are also associated with known health risk factors. Yet differences in body mass index between tenures persist after controlling for a range of risk factors and socio-demographic indicators, suggesting the presence of cultural differences and different consumption patterns. Public tenants are by far the most likely to smoke on a daily basis, with private renters and home owners with a mortgage also more likely to be smokers than are outright home owners. Further investigation is required to establish the nature and extent that patterned health inequalities and associated risk factors are linked to housing tenure. If Australian mortgagees are more likely than outright homeowners to be obese, as our findings indicate, pursuing the ‘Australian dream’ of home-ownership may contain a hidden cost to one's health.

Keywords:

• Housing tenure
• self-assessed health
• body mass index
• Australia

Acknowledgements

We thank the editor and reviewers for their helpful suggestions and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. ‘In general, would you say your health is...excellent; very good; good; fair; poor; can't choose’.

2. Body mass index is calculated on the basis of height and weight, with relevant questions available in the 2011 AuSSA. BMI is calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in metres squared.

3. We do not examine ‘underweight’ here as the N is too small to allow meaningful comparisons (N = 30).

4. ABS estimates of BMI also appears to suffer from sampling bias as ‘Females were more likely to decline, and non-response increased with age’ (ABS, 2012).

5. Initial analysis suggested that housing tenure did not discriminate heavy consumption of alcohol compared to lower consumption levels, however, tenure differences were found for lower levels of alcohol consumption versus intermediate and higher quantities.

6. As the self-assessed health dependent variable is ordinal, we use ordinal logistic regression using PROC LOGISTIC and SAS 9.2 software.