Did Housing Vouchers Buffer the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Hypertension?

Source abstract

Allostasis theory posits that the chronic stress of poverty and adverse living conditions often precipitates physiological changes that increase blood pressure. In earlier work, we found that a housing voucher reduces hypertension, presumably because the voucher improves a household’s financial status and living conditions. Here, we use the same housing voucher randomized controlled trial data to test whether a voucher buffered against a hypertensive stress response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The sample is primarily female-headed low-income households with school-age children. Baseline data were collected pre-pandemic in 2017–2018; the follow-up was conducted in 2020–2021, the early pandemic years. We represent COVID-19 by three measures of the pandemic’s impact: unemployment, standardized school test scores, and school closures. Since the pandemic had a markedly greater impact on the Cleveland metropolitan area study site than the Dallas metro site, we test for site moderator effects. The moderator term is never statistically significant, supporting the buffering hypothesis.