The Location Choices of Public Housing Residents Displaced by Redevelopment: Market Constraints, Personal Preferences, or Social Information?

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Since the early 1990s, federal housing policy in the U.S. has become increasingly concerned with the confluence of the neighborhood quality and location of assisted housing residents, and the HOPE VI program is one within this family of programs. Yet a lack of dispersal has characterized HOPE VI and other efforts to relocate public housing residents. Using one HOPE VI site in Seattle, Washington, as a case study, this article fits a conditional multinomial logit model to examine how ethnically diverse relocatees make relocation decisions. The postrelocation neighborhood’s minority composition, poverty concentration, and distance from the original public housing site interact with market characteristics, personal preferences, individual characteristics, language proficiency and information based in social networks to influence eventual location outcomes. Results suggest that personal preferences and information available through close social relationships may play an important role in determining location outcomes, and that some social network contacts may enable moves to neighborhoods of lower poverty. Once these factors are taken into account, the housing market conditions do not determine location decisions of relocatees. Implications for HOPE VI and other similar relocation programs are discussed.