The Impact of NYC Housing Conditions on Mental Health at the Community Level: Negative Effects of Crowding May Be Culturally Dependent

Neighborhood-level housing conditions and mental health are closely linked, but most work examines single indicators in isolation and assumes that crowding is uniformly harmful across populations. Using publicly available data from the NYC Environment & Health Data Portal (2007–2022) aggregated to UHF42 neighborhoods, we examined how four housing indicators (rent burden, household crowding, eviction, and homeownership) relate to adult depression, serious psychological distress, and psychiatric hospitalizations, and whether immigrant concentration moderates the effects of crowding. We aligned overlapping multi-year estimates for housing, poverty, immigrant population, and mental health outcomes, then fit mixed-effects regression models with neighborhoods as random intercepts and time period as a fixed effect. Moran’s I tests indicated that model residuals were not spatially autocorrelated. Across bivariate and multivariate models, higher eviction rates and lower homeownership were associated with higher depression and psychiatric hospitalization, and rent burden was most strongly linked to psychological distress. When poverty was added, eviction remained a unique predictor of depression and 2019 hospitalizations, whereas poverty became the strongest predictor of distress and multiyear hospitalizations. Critically, immigrant concentration significantly moderated the effects of crowding on depression and distress: crowding predicted substantially worse symptoms in neighborhoods with fewer immigrants, but this association weakened as immigrant concentration increased. This pattern contrasts with prior research that has generally reported uniformly negative psychological effects of crowding across groups, even when tolerance for density differs, suggesting that in NYC, the impact of crowding is shaped by cultural and community context rather than space constraints alone. No moderation effects were observed for psychiatric hospitalizations. Overall, these findings show that housing instability, stability, and structural poverty differentially shape chronic symptoms, acute distress, and severe psychiatric crises, and that the psychological impact of crowding is culturally dependent in ways that challenge prevailing assumptions in the literature.