Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Many in the U.S. dream of living in a free-standing house with a backyard—an ideal that is embodied in the widespread adoption of single-family zoning laws throughout the country. Despite the prevalence of these policies, little is known about whether children who live in single family homes have better outcomes than their peers in multi-family buildings. One particular challenge to understanding this relationship is that living in a single family home is often conflated with homeownership, which may confer its own set of benefits. In this paper, we begin unpack the relationship between housing type, tenure, and children’s academic and health outcomes in New York City (NYC). NYC is an ideal context to study this question, as a substantial number of owner occupants live in large, multi-family buildings (condos and coops) and a significant number of renters live in single family homes, allowing us to identify how much variation in childhood outcomes can be attributed to housing type versus tenure. To do so, we combine rich, administrative data on students’ demographics, outcomes (i.e., test scores and obesity), neighborhoods, and housing in NYC from 2007-2013, including data from property tax exemptions that allow us to identify owner occupants. We find that students in single family homes are less likely to be obese or overweight and have higher attendance and test scores, but these differences appear to be driven by owner occupants. This is an important issue as a growing number of cities consider abolishing single family zoning laws.