Abstract Childhood asthma is influenced by early-life social conditions, yet few studies have evaluated housing affordability as a modifiable structural exposure. We used data from six biennial waves (2006–2018) of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children to assess whether changes in housing affordability and rental assistance were associated with incident asthma in childhood. Fixed-effects logistic regression models were used to estimate within-child associations between time-varying housing exposure and asthma outcomes. The main analytic sample included 3,773 children asthma-free at baseline; a subsample of 522 children in low-income renting households was used to evaluate rental assistance. Transitions into affordable housing were associated with a 31% reduction in asthma risk (OR 0.69; 95% CI 0.52–0.90). Among low-income private renters, new receipt of assistance was associated with 65% lower odds of asthma onset (OR 0.35; 95% CI 0.14–0.85). No associations were observed for asthma severity. Sensitivity analyses using lagged exposures, alternative definitions of affordability, and unadjusted income models yielded consistent findings. These findings support housing affordability as a potential policy lever for asthma prevention and demonstrate the utility of within-person designs for strengthening causal inference in observational evaluation of structural interventions.
Li et al. (Fri,) studied this question.