The Association Between Apartment Layout and Depressive Symptomology among Hispanic/Latino Residents in Low-Income Housing: the AHOME Study

Abstract

In this study of low-income Hispanic/Latino adults living in 291 individual apartments in the Bronx, New York, the apartment layout was significantly associated with the odds of depressive symptomology. Women living in apartments in which the most central rooms were the living, dining, or kitchen (i.e., rooms commonly used for communal activities) were less likely to have depressive symptomology (OR = 0.44, 95% CI = 0.22-0.86) than women in apartments where the central rooms were lobbies or corridors, adjusting for demographics, health conditions, and housing and neighborhood characteristics. No statistically significant association was observed in men. We present the logic underlying the use of layout variables in this study and discuss the implications it may have for understanding the role of the home environment on psychological distress among inhabitants. The results of this study show how space syntax analysis can be used to better understanding disparities in the risk of depression and offer an additional opportunity for public health stakeholders to identify those most at risk for depression.

Keywords: Built environment; Depression; Hispanic/Latino; Housing; Space syntax.

Fig. 1

Four apartments from the study sample illustrating how depth values are computed. Each apartment is considered as a graph—a network of rooms connected by doors or thresholds. Depth between any two rooms is the number of links connecting the shortest path between the two nodes that correspond to the rooms in the graph. In Apartment 3, for example, the Kitchen (K) is at a depth of 2 from the corridor 1 (C1; black node), and the living room (L) has a depth of 1 from the same corridor 1. All graphs shown here are drawn with the most central space of each apartment as the root (black node). The computation of depths in this study entailed the construction of such graphs for each room in each apartment in the sample. The diagram also illustrates the differences between circulation- and living-centered apartments and shows that in principle either of these types can have low or high apartment mean depth values.

Fig. 2

Mosaic plots showing the association of apartment centrality on prevalence of depression (areas of rectangles are proportional to observed frequencies). In the two-way mosaic plot on the left, gender (x-axis) is plotted against prevalence of depression illustrating the slightly greater rates of depression among women. In the three-way plot on the right, the same data are split along the vertical axis by apartment centrality before being further split by depression.