Social Capital, Interpersonal Trust, and Public Housing

Abstract

Addressing the relationship between housing tenure and social disadvantage, this research examines social capital among public tenants in Australia, concentrating on their level of interpersonal trust and confidence in a range of public institutions. Through multivariate analyses of national survey data it also profiles the social and political background of public housing tenants. As expected, public tenants tend to have lower incomes, lower levels of education, and working-class backgrounds, or do not identify with any class location at all. They are less likely to be married or in de facto relationships than people in other housing tenures, but are more likely to identify with the Australian Labor Party than with the Coalition parties. Although public housing tenants have access to secure and affordable housing, they appear to be generally less trusting than private renters or homeowners and exhibit less confidence in government institutions such as the Australian parliament. Public housing tenants express lower levels of interpersonal trust even controlling for a range of social background factors, suggesting that as a form of tenure, public housing in some ways exacerbates the disadvantage of tenants.

Keywords:

• Social Capital
• Trust and Housing

Notes

¹The AuSSA includes a weighting variable to adjust the sample to reflect population parameters on the basis of age, sex, and education level (see Gibson et al., 2004). We apply the weighting variable for all analyses shown here.

²In the General Social Survey 2006, 16% of African-Americans and 21% of Hispanics agreed that “most people can be trusted,” compared to 41% of whites.

³In separate analyses (not shown) we found that Indigenous Australians exhibit less interpersonal trust than non-Indigenous Australians controlling for sex and age, although when we also controlled for housing tenure, or for education level, the effect for Indigenous people was non-significant at the 95% level. However, we note that the subsample of Indigenous Australians in the AuSSA is small (n=43), producing large standard errors. We suspect that analyses of larger samples may well show consistently lower interpersonal trust among Indigenous Australians.