Do neighborhood ties matter for residents' mental health in affordable housing: Evidence from Guangzhou, China

Abstract Neighborhood social capital and mental health are intrinsically interlinked. Nonetheless, there has been scant evidence on how neighborhood ties influence the mental health of residents in affordable housing in Chinese cities. The main objective of this paper is to examine the underlying pathway via which neighborhood tie affect mental health; specifically, to investigate effects of social ties between affordable housing residents and nearby commercial private housing residents; and secondly, those of the social ties within the same affordable housing community. We selected four typical affordable housing communities in Guangzhou City comprising a sample size of 400 participants and employed structural equation modeling (SEM) to systematically explore the different pathways through which these two types of social ties affect mental health at the neighborhood level. In particular, we focused on whether the current development trend for affordable housing surrounded by commodity housing would create issues of social comparison that could negatively impact the mental health of those residents in affordable housing. Our results report that both types of neighborhood tie have a positive effect upon mental health of the affordable housing residents. The reported evidence indicate that Guangzhou's mixed housing development approach did not adversely affect the mental health of residents due to social comparison issues, with the residents' community satisfaction being beneficially associated with mental health. Our study suggests that optimizing planning of neighborhood housing, in terms of type and diversity can be a preventive intervention to creating a healthy space that promote cross-class interactions between mixed community residents, thereby enhancing the mental health of affordable housing residents.