Household Food Insecurity and Housing Stress

ABSTRACT

This study provides new empirical evidence on the association between housing cost burden and food insecurity in the U.S. Leveraging nationally representative longitudinal data from the 2020–2023 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) and a Double Machine Learning (DML) framework, we examine whether housing cost burden is associated with multiple food insecurity and very low food security (VLFS) outcomes, and whether this association varies by tenure transition. When housing cost burden is defined as housing costs exceeding 30% of income, we find no relationship between housing cost burden and food insecurity after adjustment for observed pre‐treatment household characteristics. When a 50% threshold is used, however, housing cost burden is associated with higher binary food insecurity and food insecurity depth among households that remain non‐owners throughout the study period. Broadly consistent with previous work, stable homeownership appears to attenuate this association in some specifications. The association is also more apparent for broader food insecurity outcomes than for VLFS. These findings highlight the importance of housing‐burden severity and tenure status in understanding links between housing affordability and food hardship.