Living in privately rented homes linked to faster biological ageing, study finds
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Appears to be a typical “look at dozens of variables and pick the one that turned out to be significant” to my untrained eye. Would love to know if I’m wrong and why!
The vast majority of epidemiological papers are basically correlations with socio economic status.
>As an observational study, the research was not able to determine what is causing the link between housing tenure and biological ageing, and the DNA samples analysed so far were only from white, European householders.
There's a huge academic industrial complex generating this type of crap.
The interesting thing is that, with 40 variables the expectation is that they would find 2 spurious correlations. They got unlucky and only got to publish 1.
Also, with about 50 control variables that nobody has any idea how related they are to the outcome, I'm sure I could mess with the numbers until I find some 10 spurious correlations on the set. They quit too early.
Still, those studies are important to lead future research into the actual relevant questions. It's journalists that shouldn't touch them.
The “link” is more likely to financial stress than the kind of housing you’re in.
But, counterbalanced by the possibility of ‘having a mortgage and being stuck in a place that may not longer be optimal for your given economic changes around you’ that can lead to more stress.
Sure. But we’re talking population level differences. There’s plenty of wealthy people that also choose to rent. However, at a population level, those effects are going to be a lot smaller. If you have a 2008 situation where the entire class experiences a shock then maybe.
And those population level differences will definitely impact the data in the study, right?
> Costs are higher, conditions are worse and tenure is more precarious than in owner-occupied housing or socially rented housing.
This is clearly covering the situation of a very specific income level.
> Policies to reduce the stress and uncertainty associated with private renting, such as ending no-fault evictions, limiting rent increases and improving conditions, may go some way to reducing the negative impacts.
Again, it's pretty clear it's about specific things with respect to how things work in the UK. It's hard to translate this to America. For example, I suspect people who can rent fare better than people who are doing Section 8 housing even though Section 8 housing would be considered the "equivalent" of social housing (& projects which are the direct equivalents have been largely abandoned as failures in the US).
As for your claim that '08 happens cyclically, it's now 15 years since & hasn't happened since. The longitudinal study starts in 1991. I don't know how many housing shocks happened in the UK, but if it's anything like the US IIRC there weren't any macro economic conditions that affected home owners and not renters unlike '08. I believe like most countries the UK only offers ARM rather than 30 years which means interest rate shocks are guaranteed to hit homeowners just with a bit of added lag. There's just not enough of a cycle and the cycles don't last long enough to tease out health impacts.
There definitely is a cycle, and the cycles definitely last long enough that with some work you could see the impacts. They do tend to hit some areas of society harder than others, but on average hit everyone. And that is in the UK. Similar analysis will show similar cycles in the US, albeit not exactly in lockstep.
The Fed has been pumping since ‘09, and only stopped very recently. which is why we’ve had such a long ‘rosy’ run of it recently. Which means we’ll likely have a particularly painful impact.
But hey, maybe it’s all different this time?
[https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uk-house-price-inde...]
The article seems to be making an argument against privately rented homes and in favor of social housing. Would eliminating private renting actually reduce biological ageing? Or are the people who are predisposed to living a stressful life with fast ageing more likely to choose privately rented homes, and taking away that option wouldn't actually help them?
Why would people living stressful lives choose to rent? That makes no sense—generally speaking, people don't like renting and generally speaking it's more affordable to pay off a mortgage than it is to pay off someone else's.
Do you like buying houses with money you don't have?
If you rent you're in control. lost job, downsize with little hassle. noisy partygoers or Airbnb managers move in next door, just move
I call bullshit on both counts. When I was renting I had two separate incidents where neighbors came into the adjacent unit and caused issues. In both cases the landlord finally had to evict them.
"Downsize with little hassle" amounts to the same as "just move" which is by no means a small or easy thing to do. People have kids in school, you can't "just move" but instead have to find another apartment, that you can afford, where you can pay whatever bogus up-front fees the landlord wants. Your landlord could decide at any time to sell your building/unit/house to another landlord. Your rent goes up with no ability to control it.
Owning a home puts me in much greater control of how my life looks than renting ever did. It requires a little more effort and care for renting and there's certainly some risk, but there's a lot of upside too.
And yes, I would love to own a house. I just can't get the mortgage without meeting irrelevant and onerous criteria.
They live stressful lives because they're running after money
> it's more affordable to pay off a mortgage
Most people can;t afford mortgage. In most places they'll rent you a $500/month place but won't let you take a mortgage for $500/month. Not even taking into account current interest rates
Nit, but they can afford the mortgage fine, the problem is they're denied it.
A relative few people think it's financially better to rent than to own so they can deploy their capital elsewhere. These folks have a lot more capital to play with in the first place, and would likely be part of the group that rents but lives longer.
The rental laws in my state are also quite good and continuously getting better.
Having grown up in socially rented housing (i.e. "council housing") and then lived in private rents as an adult, I suspect the biggest factor here is security of tenure. You have a different outlook on life when your tenancy might well not be renewed in 12 months, depending on the whims of your landlord. Medium term investments like DIY or redecorating are just not something worth undertaking if you might not be there in a few months. And that's even assuming you're allowed to. Imagine needing to get someone's permission to repaint an internal door or (in some extreme cases) hang a picture on a wall.
That's without touching on the performance/behaviour of small private landlords which I think it's fair to categorise as "uneven".
Back when I was still renting, even though I had more than enough income to cover increases, I'd feel immense stress every time the months leading up to lease renewal rolled around. Keeping housing costs below a certain threshold is a critical part of being able to stick away some cash for a rainy day or even having anything left over, and accomplishing this usually meant moving every few years, which meant periodically returning once again to the grueling search for something with vaguely not-horrible value for the price, which is exacerbated if you're anything but a perfect model renter who doesn't have pets or kids — even making substantial use of the kitchen is prohibited in some rentals. A lot of landlords seem to want tenants who only ever come home to sleep and are otherwise ghosts.
Ever since I bought a house a couple of years ago, mental bandwidth I'd lost to this stress has been coming back to me. Housing costs being essentially fixed in perpetuity and there being no possibility of being forced to move has done wonders for cutting down on stress and anxiety.
Can't pay your rent? That's a crime, and the sheriff will be knocking on your door in 30 days.
Can't pay your mortgage? That's a tragedy. Here are some local, state, and federal subsidies to take care of you. And if that's not enough, don't worry, because foreclosures take over a year anyways, and you can live there for free. Oh, and we'll be sure to give billions to the private equity firms buying up houses in your neighborhood to keep the prices artificially inflated, too.
What on Earth are you talking about? There was an emergency order during COVID that prevented anyone from being evicted for about two years. A ton of landlords got absolutely screwed because their tenants stopped paying rent and could not be evicted by any means.
Sure, for the few lucky people in federal housing and the handful of states that implemented their own (the vast majority of which were lifted in less than 6 months). Point is that nearly all homeowners in the US received 18 months of mortgage forebearance immediately.
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/coronavirus/mortgage-forbear...
Yes, professional tenants were exempt. No, that wasn't much consolation to most renters.
Meanwhile, even at the highest levels of monetary policy, the aim has been to placate hysterical homeowners. Beyond aid programs, beyond preexisting tax incentives, you have the Fed refusing to Volcker us out of the way of catastrophic inflation with an appropriate rate increase, because it would wipe out the market and put everyone who wasn't in a fixed-rate loan for a house they don't plan to leave in dire straits. Instead, we let rental property owners mask their price-fixing under the guise of inflation.
In Seattle, renters didn't have to pay rent during the pandemic.
> Can't pay your rent? That's a crime
Not in Seattle, where it's considered the landlord's fault.
> Here are some local, state, and federal subsidies to take care of you.
Like what, property tax?
It references "Gov.uk. Trends in tenure. 2022"
I generally agree with this, but it's worth noting the places that do have public housing have notably lower homeless rates when compared against drug use rates. Furthermore, most housing assistance is done through section 8 vouchers, which you would presumably control for if you repeated this experiment in the US.
Many of these private landlords are non-profit orgs.
The state of Massachusetts has subsidized housing for the elderly. And they are closely monitored by social workers.
My uncle lives in one of these apartments, and whenever he goes out of town, he has to notify the social services office. Otherwise, they will open the apartment to see if everything is okay with him.
If he's gone for more than three months, he loses the right to use the apartment.
Edit: minor corrections.
My wife and I lived in an apartment several years ago. While there my wife had sleep issues and seemed to get sick more often. Close to the end of our lease, after a little rain, we found mold on the carpet and on some of our stuff in our bedroom closet.
We reported the mold to the landlords. They quickly denied it was mold, calling it “mildew” then had contractors tear open the wall and redo the insulation, carpet and walls. They offered to pay us money if we didn’t write a review regarding the incident.
We moved out as soon as we could. Now that we are lucky enough to live in our own home, we both feel a lot better in terms of sleep and health.
I can’t prove the mold was the cause of bad sleep or prove how long the mold was even there. But I don’t think I can go back to renting where I don’t have control or insight into how things are maintained.
It's horrible.
The underlying "hidden variable" might just be "poverty". So the causal relation would be something like:
Poverty -> Stress -> Faster biological ageing
Poverty -> Renting private homes
Housing is overrated as an investment. My dad lost money on every house he owned. The trouble is, he had an economics degree and knew how to calculate how much it cost to own the house. It isn't as simple as you bought it for $100,000 and sold it for $110,000.
Have you ever had a house sit vacant for months while trying to sell it? It's extremely costly, and stressful.
There is an opportunity cost of course, but the actual money-out-of-bank costs were almost zero.
What costs are you talking about?
My neighbor did a lot of repairs and upgrades before putting the house up for scale. His family had already moved out. Months of delay and gawd knows how much money he poured into it to just get past the immediate "nope" from customers. There's the rent on "staging" furniture.
In the US, I never heard of a break on the property tax for vacant properties.
When I sold my previous house, I priced it to sell to minimize vacant time.
Other costs are essentially zero. Insurance is like £0.50/day. Utilities similar amounts for standing charges and minimal usage since it is empty. You might cost the same as like a Starbucks coffee a day when everything is taken into consideration.
If course if you have a mortgage, yes, there is a cost there. But that is not so much about the empty property itself and more about your debts.
Whenever I see "financial advice youtubers" saying people shouldn't buy their homes because there's no liquidity I think about my 2.5K 30 years fixed mortgage in a mcmansion which is the same I paid for rent in a 2br in PHL's center city 3 years ago.
Had I listened to them i would likely be paying half my salary in rent alone to live at some shitty apartment building with bad schools and a landlord that was going to hike the price as far as he could. Guess that constant stress might not be good for my health.
No, the liability is rent. I'd happily take upkeep just to avoid a parasitic middleman that adds no value. People generally don't rent because they don't want to buy; they rent because banks withhold the mortgages necessary to own even though renting is a higher monthly commitment.
Yeah, the words "monthly commitment" are the key there, which describe the upper limit to your exposure. There's value (which has a cost) to the limited liability.
Conversely, you're not entering into a long-term debt relationship, nor do you have the obligation to fund or perform ad-hoc maintenance. As a renter, you are abstracted from those additional and significant risks, but you do pay for the privilege. You get to simply throw money at the problem, not concern yourself with where to find a new zone valve at 11pm or whether you should tie up cash to keep inventory on hand.
There's a sizeable market of people who prefer not to buy - young people who aren't settled down to one place; older people who don't want to do maintenance work; middle-aged people who don't want commitment (because reasons).
There are also people who would prefer to buy but can't qualify. There are also people who merely think they would prefer to buy (but do nothing to structure their lives around it, or even comprehend the obligations it entails).
It seems you're talking earnestly about the people who prefer to buy but can't qualify.
In that case, you're stuck renting and invariably are going to hate the landlord/super (they always suck), the place will seem rattier every month, you obsess over visions of what you would do with the place if you just had ownership incentive to invest in the asset. Been there.
The only way out of that is to structure your life financially towards the goal. That can include voting with your feet to live somewhere not as expensive to buy (and taking the trade-offs in location), it can mean disciplined spending to reduce expenses, ambitious career advancement to increase revenue, and maybe partnering with someone highly trusted to go halvsies. This can be an outcome (though not a sole motivation) for marriage, or may look like an LLC with a friend with an operating agreement that clearly details the terms of dissolution, buy-out, inheritance, etc.
But at the end of the day it's important to recognize that mortgages are money-making endeavors for banks who are greatly incentivized to set them up (sometimes too much, e.g. see 2008 CDOs), but through a combination of regulation and their own risk-management need you to meet a certain risk profile (e.g. are you "stable", do you make more money that you owe, are you gainfully employed, etc.). They would no more lend to a bad profile than you would. Any you're not even family. ;)