Brickonomics

In “A Room With a View or a Room of One’s Own? Housing and Social Stratification“, Dalton Conley (an ‘academic superstar’, according to the Guardian) reports some interesting findings on the relationship between family background, household conditions and educational attainment.

Echoing similar research carried out in France, he finds that “children who lived in crowded conditions … completed almost a quarter year less schooling than those who lived in more spacious conditions”, that home ownership also boosts attainment independently of family background and concludes that “housing plays an intermediary role in the transmission of socioeconomic status from one generation to the next”.

The issue of overcrowding raises interesting questions about ‘absolute’ versus ‘relative’ effects similar to controversies over absolute versus relative poverty. It’s easy to see why crowded accommodation might have direct impacts upon children’s attainment independent of conditions outside the home – Conley cites evidence for higher morbidity, less privacy and less ‘consructive interaction’ between parents and children in crowded homes. But are there relative effects too? Parents and teachers of overcrowded children often describe them as reluctant to bring friends round because of shame over conditions at home, and if they do attach a stigma to their home life they may be more reluctant to spend time there, perhaps increasing their exposure to negative influences outside the home. This is all hard to measure, of course, and if I had to say I’d guess the ‘absolute’ effect dominates, but the fact that we are still picking up clear effects caused by overcrowding measured as over 1 persons per room, even thoguh that was probably considered relatively salubrious in early 20th century London, suggests that relative effects are also important.

Two other findings of Conley’s are interesting, but perhaps more so in the American context of black-white housing segregation. Firstly,

even when a 5-year income measure, education and other demographic characteristics are held constant, blacks and female heads [i.e. lone mothers] suffer from worse housing outcomes

but

when socioeconomic and housing conditions are held constant, Africa-Americans actually demonstrate an educational advantage over their non-black counterparts of almost four-tenths of a grade.

The message is clear – if you want to close the education gap between black and white, you have to close not just the gap in incomes but the one in housing conditions too.