Better to Grow Up Poor in a Richer Place? Social Housing, Neighbourhood Comparisons, and English Teenagers’ Well-Being

How does relative deprivation within their neigbourhood affect the lives of teenagers? We use the 2009-2019 Understanding Society youth samples and the 2019 Index of Multiple Deprivation to explore this question. We investigate a sample of over 1700 13-to-15-year-olds living in social housing in England, where social housing procedures approximate a form of quasi-exogenous allocation. Investigating a neighbourhood effect at the fine-grained level of Lower Layer Super Output Areas, we study altogether fifteen subdimensions across three domains of self-reported ‘problems’ in these young teenagers’ lives: (a) their sense of generally leading a bad life, (b) conflictual family interactions with their mother and siblings, and (c) unhappy social interactions with their peers. We find that living in social housing within a less deprived neighbourhood does not affect these teenagers’ general sense of leading a bad life, except to reduce their sense of having a bad appearance. Nor does living in a less deprived neighbourhood affect conflict in these teenagers’ family interactions. And it actually makes them less likely to report unhappy social interactions with their peers.