The Influence of Urban Residential Preferences on Spatial Behavior

Abstract

T HE level of residential preferences in the United States is wide-ranging: from region to neighborhood, from urban to rural, from single-family dwelling to high-rise housing, to list only few of the possible levels. The level selected for examination in this article is the residential preference for the large urban places that are usually the central cities in metropolitan areas. The general topic of residential preferences has received modest but sincere attention from geographers since the publication of On Mental Maps, by Peter R. Gould in 1966.1 Three fundamental concerns appear to permeate investigations of residential preferences: the communality or the variability of these preferences, the type of content expressed in them, and the degree to which these preferences relate something about human behavior. I accept the premise that residential preference is an attitude. According to the psychologist, Martin Fishbein, an attitude is a learned predisposition to respond to any object in consistently favorable or unfavorable way.2 An attitude may have three basic components: the affective refers to person's positive or negative feeling toward an object; the cognitive reflects knowledge and awareness of details associated with an object; the behavioral concerns personal desire to react or to respond to an object.3 In this article the cognitive and behavioral components of residential-preference attitudes, that is, communality and content and their association with interurban migration, receive more attention than does the affective component of attitudes. The relationship between attitude and behavior has been central issue in social psychology since the early part of the twentieth century.4 Despite wealth of attitude-behavior research, the failure of attitudes to be the basis to predict behavior is well documented.5 Several geographers followed this trend of thought by questioning the utility or the value of research that views resi-