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Is Living in a High-Rise Building Bad for Your Self-Rated Health?

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Abstract

While the construction of high-rise buildings is a popular policy strategy for accommodating population growth in cities, there is still much debate about the health consequences of living in high flats. This study examines the relationship between living in high-rise buildings and self-rated health in Belgium. We use data from the Belgian Census of 2001, merged with the National Register of Belgium (N = 6,102,820). Results from multilevel, binary logistic regression analyses show that residents living in high-rise buildings have considerable lower odds to have a good or very good self-rated health in comparison with residents in low-rise buildings (OR 0.67; 95 % CI 0.67–0.68). However, this negative relationship disappears completely after adjusting for socioeconomic and demographic variables (OR 1.04; 95 % CI 1.03–1.05), which suggests that residents’ worse self-rated health in high-rise buildings can be explained by the strong demographic and socioeconomic segregation between high- and low-rise buildings in Belgium. In addition, there is a weak, but robust curvilinear relationship between floor level and self-rated health within high-rise buildings. Self-rated health increases until the sixth floor (OR 1.19; 95 % CI 1.15–1.24) and remains stable from the seventh floor and upwards. These findings refute one of the central ideas in architectural sciences that living in high buildings is bad for one’s health.

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Notes

  1. ‘European Union members’ are defined as all members of the EU28 (without Belgians) and including people with Andorran, Gibraltarian, Icelandic, Liechtenstein, Monegasque, Norwegian, Sanmarinese, Swiss and Vatican origin. This includes people with roots in former Czechoslovakia but excludes people with roots in former Yugoslavia or the USSR if it was impossible to determine in which current day country these people were born.

  2. The category ‘higher secondary education’ also includes the people with post-secondary, but no higher education degrees.

  3. Sensitivity analyses in which we treat floor level as a metric variable show also a weak curvilinear relationship (not shown, but available upon request).

  4. Sensitivity analyses show that—after deleting the outliers through boxplot statistics—the odds ratio to have a good or very good self-rated health for residents living on the 13th floor lies within the confidence interval of the odds ratios for residents on the 12th or 14th floor, both before and after adjustment (not shown, but available upon request).

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Acknowledgments

This research has been funded by the Special Research Fund of Ghent University (Dr. Pieter-Paul Verhaeghe: grant number B/13836/01; and Ad Coenen: grand number BOF.PDO.14.0032.01). There are no conflicts of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

    Pieter-Paul Verhaeghe, Ad Coenen & Bart Van de Putte

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  1. Pieter-Paul Verhaeghe
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  2. Ad Coenen
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  3. Bart Van de Putte
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Correspondence to Pieter-Paul Verhaeghe.

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Ethics

The use of the Belgian Census and National Register data of 2001 was approved by the National Privacy Commission of Belgium, with the approval covering the present study (STAT 02/2014).

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Verhaeghe, PP., Coenen, A. & Van de Putte, B. Is Living in a High-Rise Building Bad for Your Self-Rated Health?. J Urban Health 93, 884–898 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11524-016-0066-5

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