Mary Jane Grove is a Research Assistant with the NZ Centre for Sustainable Cities.
She has recently completed her Master's thesis titled Wellbeing through housing: Public Renter subjective wellbeing outcomes relative to other forms of tenure in Aotearoa.
"Alongside the well-established effects of housing and neighbourhood quality, research has increasingly found housing tenure to have important implications for individuals' subjective wellbeing. The extent that the COVID-19 pandemic emphasised these tenure-based wellbeing disparities in Aotearoa, however, is under-informed, and the gap that this research aimed to fill. Utilising data from the Quality of Life Survey – Wellington Components, across three significant survey years in the COVID-19 period (2018, 2020 and 2022), a mixed-method approach was used to compare subjective wellbeing outcomes (WHO-5 and Life Satisfaction) across tenure types in the Wellington region.
The analysis found that, after accounting for observable demographic variables, public tenants were no less happy on the WHO-5 measure than private tenants. Additionally, shifts in wellbeing during the pandemic were experienced evenly among private tenants, public tenants, and owner-occupiers, and relative differences in wellbeing between tenure types over COVID-19 remained similar to those observed in 2018. Finally, demographic effects were found to influence subjective wellbeing across tenure, with a positive wellbeing association in public tenancy compared to private tenancy in 2020 and 2022 for Pacific respondents."