Renting, Crowded, and Unaffordable? Social Vulnerabilities and the Accumulation of Precarious Housing Conditions in Los Angeles

Eileen Diaz McConnell, Arizona State University

Inspired by recent research linking social vulnerabilities, precarious housing, and resilience, this study focuses on the characteristics of socially vulnerable people and a likely reality for this population: that they experience multiple precarious housing conditions at the same time. The analyses use Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey data to: 1) describe the distribution of renting, crowding, and housing affordability problems; 2) identify the social vulnerabilities associated with experiencing two or more of these overlapping conditions simultaneously; and to 3) estimate predicted probabilities of overlapping precarious housing for hypothetical cases of respondents. The descriptive and multivariate analyses are carried out with a sample of U.S.-born Whites, Blacks, and Latinos and three distinct Latino immigrant groups varying by citizenship and legal status. The results draw attention to the range of social vulnerabilities linked with group-level disparities in the accumulation of housing disadvantage, with implications for social vulnerability, resilience, and housing literatures