Collective Ownership, Individual Wellbeing? A Three-Paper Quantitative Biopsychosocial Examination of Cooperative Housing Tenure in the Canadian Housing Survey

Abstract

Despite increasing recognition of housing as a social determinant of health, the cooperative housing tenure model has received little attention in housing research, particularly in quantitative analyses. This dissertation conceptualizes and applies a biopsychosocial (BPS) framework for housing, integrating Engel’s (1977) BPS model of health with Pearlin et al.’s (1981) stress process model to examine how the structural characteristics of the cooperative tenure model shape residents’ exposure to housing-related stressors, social connection, and mental health. Using three waves of the Canadian Housing Survey (2018, 2021, 2022-23), this analysis advances from descriptive characterization through multivariate signature analysis to quasi-experimental causal inference, building cumulative evidence that housing tenure is an institutional condition with meaningful consequences for residents' well-being. Paper 1 establishes the descriptive foundation of the Canadian cooperative tenure model by comparing residents with private-market renters and residents of other tenure models on demographics, housing conditions, housing satisfaction, social connection, and well-being outcomes. Market cooperative residents experienced significantly lower housing costs, longer tenure, greater economic buffering, and reduced exposure to housing stressors than their comparable private-market rental counterparts. These advantages varied across household types, with single-person households showing the clearest mental health benefits and single-parent households exhibiting more complex patterns. Paper 2 uses exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) to map the latent dimensional structure of the rental housing experience available to this working-class and middle-income segment of the population and to distinguish the market cooperative's multivariate signature from that of private-market rental housing. Nine interpretable dimensions emerged, consistent with the proposed biopsychosocial model. The cooperative tenure model was most strongly anchored by dwelling space adequacy, reduced economic hardship coping behaviors, and anticipated length of stay. Crucially, cooperative housing did not score meaningfully worse than private market rental housing on any dimension, indicating an institutional rather than a context-dependent advantage. Paper 3 uses a difference-in-differences design to test whether cooperative housing buffered mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. Cooperative residents were shielded from approximately 72% of the mental health decline observed in private market renters, an effect exceeding the protection associated with homeownership. Cooperative residents simultaneously reported the largest surge in community belonging while facing greater economic hardship, pointing to social connection rather than economic hardship buffering as the protective mechanism. Together, these findings establish cooperative housing as a structurally distinct tenure model that exhibits reduced permeability to housing-related stressors and cultivates a social infrastructure that is activated during a crisis, with implications for housing research, housing policy, population health, and the design of healthy housing.