A high volume of home mortgage lending plays a key role in neighborhood well-being

Often, research linking mental health and home mortgages has focused on individual respondents’ financial fears of foreclosure. In this article, Chen et al. instead looked at the impact of home mortgage lending on public health, at the neighborhood level, in the 18 largest metro areas in the US. Their focus was on new mortgages issued between 2011 and 2020, so they analyzed decadal mortgage data aggregated by census tract from the National Neighborhood Data Archive (NaNDA) at ICPSR. They combined the NaNDA mortgage data with US mental health and socioeconomic data from 2020, reported by the CDC PLACES Project and provided at various geographic levels. Chen et al. found that neighborhoods with higher “mortgage density” (the ratio of mortgages issued to total households) consistently were correlated with lower rates of self-reported poor mental health, even after controlling for socioeconomic factors. A high volume of home mortgage lending appeared to benefit community mental health by providing housing security, wealth-building opportunities, and neighborhood investment.