Emma Baker

University of Adelaide · School of Architecture and Built Environment

A substantial international body of evidence links housing to health outcomes. In 2021, the World Health Organisation (WHO) evaluated a small selection of policies from its six geographic regions and found that, in Australia as in the rest of the world, existing healthy housing measures fall short of the systemic response required to address health...

Housing that is in poor physical condition has direct negative health impacts for occupants, is more expensive to run and reduces Australia’s ability to mitigate and adapt to climate change. This research investigates what is needed to lift the quality of Australian housing to align with international standards so as to address problems associated...

Understanding the patterns and impacts of population migrations within Australia is key for governments and providers of housing, infrastructure and services to be able to plan where they will prioritise resources. New AHURI research critically assesses the population projection methods available to Australian decision-makers and planners.Populatio...

This research investigates the Australian rental sector during the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic and considers priorities for governments; tenant experiences and reflections on the effectiveness of assistance and interventions; changing tenant aspirations; and the priorities for emerging responses.The research highlights how ‘nimble’ the Aus...

For the past two decades, researchers and policy makers have known very little about conditions within Australia’s housing stock due to a lack of systematic and reliable data. In 2022, a collaboration of Australian universities and researchers commissioned a large survey of 22,550 private rental, social rental and homeowner households to build a da...

Background Numerous aspects of housing are associated with health. However, the pathways between housing and health, particularly the psychosocial elements of housing, are less well understood. Epigenetic information alongside social survey data offers an opportunity to explore biological ageing, measured using DNA methylation, as a potential pathw...

Researchers across disciplines are increasing attention to cold housing environments. Public health, environmental and social sciences, architecture, and engineering each define and measure cold housing environments differently. Lack of standardisation hinders our ability to combine evidence, determine prevalence, understand who is most at risk––an...

Australia is considered by many to be a warm climate country and hence winter cold and its health effects are often overlooked. The majority of the Australian population live in temperate climate regions, which are heating-dominated and experience cold wintertime conditions. The prevalence of cold in Australian homes has to date been rarely measure...

The social housing sector provides housing to some of society's most vulnerable people, disproportionately housing people with disabilities and chronic health conditions, the aged and people unable to work. These groups are often more susceptible to health impacts from poor temperature conditions within their home. In this paper, we examine tempera...

A large proportion of Australia’s housing stock offered for private rental or socially let is of poor quality, which has implications for residents’ health and well-being. This problem has arisen from historically weak regulation of housing standards and under-investment in public housing services, both features of Australia’s neoliberal housing re...

Background: Houses in mild-climate countries, such as Australia, are often ill-equipped to provide occupants protection during cold weather due to their design. As a result, we rely on energy to warm homes, however, energy is becoming increasingly expensive, and evidence is emerging of a sizable burden to population health of being unable to affor...

Cold homes are associated with a range of serious health conditions as well as excess winter mortality. Despite a comparatively mild climate cold homes are a significant problem in the UK, with a recent estimate finding that over one-quarter of low-income households had been unable to adequately heat their home in winter 2022. The magnitude of cold...

Housing inequality is far more than a housing matter. To discover how housing inequality has been used across disciplines, and how this may inform future housing research, we performed a systematic scoping review. We found that housing inequality provides multiple understandings as well as a variety of uses, for example, as a measurement tool, a co...

This paper examines changing trends in housing affordability in the Netherlands and its link to mental health across tenures and age cohorts. Using the LISS panel dataset over 11 years (2008 to 2019), we assess trends in the prevalence of unaffordable housing and subsequently examine its relationship with psychological wellbeing based on ‘Mental He...

Increasing numbers of relatively affluent people are endeavoring to reduce everyday consumption and waste in response to environmental and social concerns. This paper explores five activist lifestyles and grassroots social movements that aim to reduce everyday consumption to uncover who, why, what and how households reduce consumption. Our understa...

Unaffordable housing has many dimensions, not least its far-reaching implications for mental health. Although the psycho-social effects of housing affordability stress are well documented there is a lack of research on their variation within or between cohorts who have shared experiences of housing (social generations). This article fills that gap...

Recent crises have underscored the importance that housing has in sustaining good health and, equally, its potential to harm health. Considering this and building on Howden-Chapman's early glossary of housing and health and the WHO Housing and Health Guidelines, this paper introduces a range of housing and health-related terms, reflecting almost 20...

Background Exposure to cold indoor temperature (< 18 degrees Celsius) increases cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk and has been identified by the WHO as a source of unhealthy housing. While warming homes has the potential to reduce CVD risk, the reduction in disease burden is not known. We simulated the population health gains from reduced CVD burde...

A wide variety of methods have been developed for identifying depression, but they focus primarily on measuring the degree to which individuals are suffering from depression currently. In this work we explore the possibility of predicting future depression using machine learning applied to longitudinal socio-demographic data. In doing so we show th...

This research reviewed Australia’s COVID-19 housing policy responses to better understand their intervention approach, underlying logic, short and long term goals, target groups and level of success.

The well-being of people during COVID-19 lockdowns has been a global concern. Renters, who often live in small, shared and less secure forms of housing, are potentially more vulnerable during COVID-19 and associated restrictions such as lockdowns. This paper explores the well-being of renters during COVID-19 in Australia using a survey of 15,000 re...

Each year the proportion of Australians who rent their home increases and, for the first time in generations, there are now as many renters as outright homeowners. Researchers and policy makers, however, know very little about housing conditions within Australia’s rental housing sector due to a lack of systematic, reliable data. In 2020, a collabor...

Background Exposure to cold indoor temperature (<18 degrees Celsius) increases cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk and has been identified by the WHO as a source of unhealthy housing. While warming homes has the potential to reduce CVD risk, the reduction in disease burden is not known. We simulated the population health gains from reduced CVD burden...

Aims To understand better the longstanding inequalities concerning alcohol and tobacco use, we aimed to quantify the effect of household economic security on alcohol and tobacco consumption and expenditure. Design Longitudinal analysis using data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey (2001‐2018).. Setting Australia P...

Depression is among the most prevalent mental disorders, affecting millions of people of all ages globally. Machine learning techniques have shown effective in enabling automated detection and prediction of depression for early intervention and treatment. However, they are challenged by the relative scarcity of instances of depression in the data....

This paper presents a national analysis of urban housing pathways. Focussing on the social housing sector, we follow social housing tenants as they move into, out of, and remain in, the sector over 15 years. Utilising a linked actuarial dataset, the paper reveals a typology of pathways, and examines the relationship between housing pathways and the...

This research surveyed and analysed the circumstances for Australian renters during the initial phase of the COVID-19 lockdowns in July and August 2020 to identify challenges for the rental sector and to give insights into how the rental market is performing, the uptake of existing support measures and the demand for future assistance.

This research examined the incidence of energy hardship for Australian low income renters, and considered strategies and policy actions to reduce its impact on the lives of such households. Up to 40% of Australian households who rent their housing experience energy hardship. Energy hardship can include both absolute and relative measures of financi...

Persons with a disability are at a far higher risk of homelessness than those without. The economic, social and health challenges faced by disabled people are addressed, in Australia, by the recently implemented National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Using nationally representative, longitudinal household panel data, we construct the Index of...

Purpose Unaffordable housing has a negative impact on mental health; however, little is known about the causal pathways through which it transmits this effect. We examine the role of financial hardship and social support as mediators of this relationship. Methods We identified households where housing costs changed from affordable to unaffordable...

PurposeWhen housing is insufficient, or poor quality, or unaffordable there are well established health effects. Despite the pervasiveness of housing affordability problems (widely referred to as Housing Affordability Stress—HAS), little quantitative work has analysed long-term mental health effects. We examine the mental health effects of (prolong...

The research provides new national evidence on social housing pathways using longitudinal and linked national data. · The ‘success’ of a social housing pathway should be judged on relative, rather than definitive terms. · Most Australian social housing pathways are stable or involve entry into social housing with subsequent stability. · Some pathwa...

Unaffordable housing costs are one of the most pressing issues facing our cities, affecting people's health in difficult to measure ways. People's health varies over time and dynamically interacts with experiences of housing. Longitudinal analyses rarely explicitly model these variations. Quantile regression is an underutilised tool for testing ass...

Cold housing is not widely recognized as a problem that occurs in mild-climate countries like Australia. But emerging evidence suggests that it is an important, albeit under-acknowledged, problem that may contribute to high rates of ill health and mortality during the winter months. We bring together two historically important theoretical developme...

This paper reports on the first phase of an ambitious program of research that seeks to both understand the risk of homelessness amongst persons with a disability in Australia and shed light on the impact of a significant policy reform—the introduction of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS)—in changing the level of homelessness risk. Th...

Context: This study reviews collective evidence on the longitudinal impact of housing disadvantage (based on tenure, precarity, and physical characteristics) on mental health. It is focused on temporally ordered studies where exposures preceded outcomes, a key criterion to establishing causal evidence. Evidence acquisition: A systematic review o...

International evidence suggests that cold housing – and its effects on health – is not just confined to countries with very cold winters. Rather, a small but increasing body of work is revealing that unacceptably low indoor temperatures are often experienced in housing in mild-climate countries. This paper presents the findings from a field study o...

This paper describes who is most likely to experience household employment insecurity and housing affordability stress – double precarity – and estimates the degree to which housing affordability mediates the effect of employment insecurity on mental health. We use a cohort of 24,201 participants in 2016 Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Aus...

Housing problems, such as affordability, poor quality of condition, or damp, are key determinants of health and wellbeing. Importantly, though, a growing body of research has shown that unhealthy housing is the combined result of multiple housing problems acting together. Although the spatial distribution of discrete housing problems is well establ...

Access to adequate, safe, secure, accessible and affordable housing is a fundamental human right and one stipulated in the United Nations Conventions on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Australian adults with disabilities experience housing disadvantage including homelessness, poor-quality housing and housing unaffordability; however, we la...

Background: Social housing may provide an affordable and secure residential environment, but has also been associated with stigma, poor housing conditions and locational disadvantage. We examined the cumulative effect of additional years, and tenure security (number of transitions in/out), of social housing on mental health in a large cohort of lo...

Considerable research effort has sought to understand the prevalence and effects of housing affordability problems in Australian cities and regions. While subject to ongoing debate, the 30/40 ratio indicator of housing affordability stress (HAS) is the most widely used measure. We suggest, however, that it only measures the risk of housing affordab...

Living with housing problems increases the risk of mental ill health. Housing problems tend to persist over time but little is known about the mental health consequences of living with persistent housing problems. We investigated if persistence of poor housing affects mental health over and above the effect of current housing conditions. We used da...

In seeking to understand the relationship between housing and health, research attention is often focussed on separate components of people’s whole housing ‘bundles’. We propose in this paper that such conceptual and methodological abstraction of elements of the housing and health relationship limits our ability to understand the scale of the accum...

Housing is a central component of productive, healthy, and meaningful lives, and a principle social determinant of health and well-being. Surprisingly, though, evidence on the ways that housing influences health in Australia is poorly developed. This stems largely from the fact that the majority of the population are accommodated in good quality ho...

This paper presents an alternative view on the patterning of housing problems – across populations and within people. The conceptualization of housing problems through a ‘housing niche’ lens allows the cumulative influence of multiple housing vulnerabilities to be better visualized and understood. Using a large, representative sample of the Austral...

This study uses a novel spatial approach to compare population density change across cities and over time. It examines spatio-temporal change in Australia’s five most populated capital cities from 1981 to 2011, and documents the established and emerging patterns of population distribution. The settlement patterns of Australian cities have changed s...

In this issue of the Journal, Reeves et al. (Am J Epidemiol 2016;184(6):421-429) present the findings of a natural experiment analyzing the association between reduced housing affordability and mental ill health. Their difference-in-difference analysis of cross-sectional, quarterly population health surveys administered before and after implementat...

This paper uses longitudinal data to examine the interrelationship between two central social determinants of mental health – employment security and housing affordability. Data from ten annual waves of the longitudinal Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey (which commenced in 2000/1 and is ongoing) were analysed using f...

This paper applies established methods from population geography to assess the impact of Australia’s emerging housing affordability crisis in shaping the distribution of Australia’s population into more or less advantaged places. Using a whole of population measure of locational advantage/disadvantage, we analyse the characteristics of movers, thei...

Acquiring a disability in adulthood is associated with a reduction in mental health. Access to secure and affordable housing is associated with better mental health. We hypothesised that the association between acquisition of disability and mental health was modified by housing tenure and affordability. We used twelve annual waves of data (2001-201...

Housing, employment and economic conditions in many nations have changed greatly over the past decades. This paper explores the ways in which changing housing markets, economic conditions and government policies have affected vulnerable individuals and households, using Australia as a case study. The paper finds a substantial number and proportion...

This paper contributes insights into the role of tenure in modifying the relationship between housing affordability and health, using a cross-national comparison of similar post-industrial nations—Australia and the United Kingdom—with different tenure structures. The paper utilises longitudinal data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in...

Poor housing affordability is of increasing concern for individuals and their governments across post-industrial countries. This article examines the measurement of housing affordability, to show that conventional point-in-time measures of housing affordability fail to capture the substantial movement that many individuals make into and out of poor...

The association between contemporaneous poor housing conditions and mental health is well established. This paper uses longitudinal panel data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) to: (1) examine the effects of persistent poor housing on mental health, and (2) to estimate the amount of “churn” through poor housing and the amount of time s...

Background People with disabilities are socio-economically disadvantaged and have poorer health than people without disabilities; however, little is known about the way in which disadvantage is patterned by gender and type of impairment. Objectives 1. To describe whether socio-economic circumstances vary according to type of impairment (sensory an...

Over the last decade, Australia has experienced ongoing housing affordability decline, and this has been experienced unevenly across the population. Because housing affordability directly affects the type, quality and security of housing that individuals can access, it represents both an important potential source and symptom of disadvantage in Aus...

There is increasing evidence of a direct association between unaffordable housing and poor mental health, over and above the effects of general financial hardship. Type of housing tenure may be an important factor in determining how individuals experience and respond to housing affordability problems. This study investigated whether a relationship...

In Australia, an increasing number of households face problems of access to suitable housing in the private market. In response, the Federal and State Governments share responsibility for providing housing assistance to these, mainly low-income, households. A broad range of policy instruments are used to provide and maintain housing assistance acro...

In the research and policy community there is ongoing debate about the measurement of housing affordability. This debate is important because what we measure affects the perceived prevalence of housing affordability problems, who should be targeted for intervention, and ultimately it reflects how well government agencies have addressed the affordab...

Housing tenure sits at the heart of much academic and policy literature across many post-industrial countries, and, while debate is often centred on promoting tenure choice, surprisingly little is known of the underlying ways that the tenure chosen can affect health. While population characteristics tend to vary between tenure types, this largely r...

This report is a scoping study, highlighting current knowledge, existing research gaps, and key research required to fill those gaps. It investigates individual and household responses to declining housing affordability in Australia across three areas: 1. Affordability constraints and trade-offs. 2. Population changes that might occur in response t...

Urban regeneration is increasingly used by Australian governments as a means of physically upgrading ageing public dwelling stock, but little is known about the social implications of regeneration projects. For public tenants involuntarily relocated for urban regeneration, relocation risks added stress and disruption for an already disadvantaged po...

In a number of Australian and international studies persons with a disability have been shown to be more vulnerable to homelessness than the broader population. While homelessness among this group is often related to low incomes, restricted engagement with the labour market, and housing limitations, it is also clear that homelessness risk, and the...

Poor housing affordability affects around 10% of the Australian population and is increasingly prevalent. The authors tested two hypotheses: that cumulative exposure to housing affordability stress (HAS) is associated with poorer mental health and that effects vary by gender. The authors estimated the relationship between cumulative exposure to HAS...

This paper discusses the recent evolution, at a time of turmoil within global financial markets, of Australia's housing system and considers the effectiveness of housing assistance responses formulated to assist lo- income Australians. Following the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), housing was recast in the public and political consciousness and rece...

Evidence about the mental health consequences of unaffordable housing is limited. The authors investigated whether people whose housing costs were more than 30% of their household income experienced a deterioration in their mental health (using the Short Form 36 Mental Component Summary), over and above other forms of financial stress. They hypothe...

The growth of widespread unencumbered home ownership and subsequent intergenerational transfers of wealth is one of the most important dimensions of social differentiation within Australian society. What is the future for those members of the recession cohort of the early 1990s who are having to start to climb the housing career ladder without any...

Housing assistance remains one of the fundamental pillars of social security policy in most developed economies, even though the nature and form of that support has been transformed in many nations. Countries such as the USA, Australia, Germany, Switzerland and New Zealand maintain taxation and other policies that provide wide-ranging support for h...