Housing Satisfaction Among Older Adults Living in Low-Income Seniors’ Housing

ABSTRACT

Tenant experience surveys are a key tool for social housing landlords to gauge their success in providing high quality housing. This paper examines feedback from a tenant experience survey facilitated in a low-income housing seniors’ housing community to: (1) examine their perceptions of their housing across key domains related to tenant satisfaction; and (2) identify opportunities they felt would improve their housing experience. A total of 1,114 households completed the survey. Results showed that tenants generally had high satisfaction with property management, safety and security, communication with staff, access to services, community support, and tenancy management. However, open-ended comments from tenants highlighted specific situations that negatively impacted their housing, including maintenance issues, safety concerns, and limited access to health and social programs. Findings point to several suggestions for social housing providers to enhance their services to foster inclusive, supportive, and safe housing environments for low-income older adults.

KEYWORDS:

• Social housing
• aging
• housing satisfaction
• residential satisfaction
• cross-sectional survey

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the housing provider for their support with survey design, administration, and coding. We would also like to thank the tenants for sharing their feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (PIDN [NHS 9-11] to SLH and AA). The views expressed are of the authors and the funding entity accepts no responsibility for themChristine Sheppard is supported by a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Fellowship in Research & Knowledge Translation in Urban Housing and Health (RAT-171349).