Local Social Capital, Disaster Housing Damage, and Mental Health: Insights from Hurricane Harvey

Community-level social capital has been theorized to shape mental health, particularly in disaster contexts, but methodological complexities hamper prior studies. Pairing zip-code-level data on social capital from Opportunity Insights with repeated cross-sectional health survey data before and after Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Texas, we examine how local social capital moderated the mental health consequences of disaster housing damage. We first document null associations between local social capital and residents’ mental health before the disaster. Next, we fit models predicting psychological distress and poor mental health days, revealing that local levels of economic connectedness and rates of volunteering offset adverse mental health effects of home damage after the storm and patterned disaster assistance receipt. These findings have broader implications for literatures on community resilience, mental health, and disaster recovery.