Moving to a better place? Residential mobility among families with young children in the Millennium Cohort Study

Ludovica Gambaro,Heather Joshi,Ruth Lupton

doi:10.1002/psp.2072

Abstract

AbstractThis paper assesses how far residential moves can result in improvement or deterioration of the housing and neighbourhood circumstances for families with young children. It uses data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study concentrating on the time between infancy and age 5, 2001 to 2006. First, we ask which families moved home and in what circumstances. We then examine how moving changed several aspects of housing: space standards, damp problems, and tenure. We show that the majority of moves resulted in improvements to housing conditions, especially in reducing overcrowding. We also consider neighbourhood circumstances, proxied by a measure of local poverty at small‐area level. Movers generally ended up in neighbourhoods with lower levels of poverty, or no worse, but almost one fifth of moves were downward or remained in the 30 percent poorest areas. We ask whether locating in an area with more local poverty may help achieve a larger home. There is evidence of such a trade‐off—1 in 5 families moved to a larger home, which was either in a poorer area than before or remained in the 30 percent poorest areas. We conclude by showing how the path of upward housing mobility, while numerically dominant, was far less common among families with relatively low resources and whose moves were attendant on partnership changes. For them, moves often result in smaller homes in poorer areas.

Highlights

Moving home is a common experience for families with young children
As divorce and separation rates increased in the 1980s, studies of mobility highlighted how these disruptive events tend to lead to downward mobility—out of home ownership, to smaller homes, or more disadvantaged neighbourhoods (Dieleman & Schouw, 1989; Feijten, 2005; Feijten & van Ham, 2010; Sullivan, 1986)
Before investigating which groups of families were more likely to move to larger homes and less poor areas, we look at another aspect of housing, which is central in the literature on housing careers—tenure

Summary

| INTRODUCTION

Moving home is a common experience for families with young children. Forming a family often involves a change of residence as adults set up together, enter parenthood, and have more children. In contrast to the majority of mobility studies, which tend to examine moves between 2 consecutive years, the finding of intergenerational continuity by van Ham et al (2014) used Swedish register data over a span of 20 years They showed that parental neighbourhood is highly predictive of the types of neighbourhood children move to during their adult years, even in a fairly inclusive housing market such as the Sweden's. Clark, Deurloo, and Dieleman (2006) examined to what extent gains in neighbourhood quality were the by‐product of improvements in housing or had, instead, an independent role in families' relocation choices Their results, based on Dutch data, suggest that neighbourhood improvements were mostly achieved in conjunction with moves to better homes. In addition to housing tenure and the level of poverty of the area at sweep 1, the region indicators help control for the variations in the structure of mobility opportunities

| RESULTS

Findings

| DISCUSSION

| CONCLUSIONS