Residential Decisions Research Articles

Causal Heterogeneity in Between-Neighborhood Selection

Why, when given the opportunity to move from high- to low-poverty neighborhoods, do some low-income families return to disadvantaged settings? Extant literature emphasizes low-income families’ “reactive” migration to structural forces beyond their control. But social ties are in fact a component of social structure that may be a relevant resource for low-income families’ residential migration decisions. Drawing on longitudinal geographic, interview, and social network data with 75 low-income mothers who survived Hurricane Katrina, I find the importance of social ties is magnified in situations of unplanned moves. Network peers from the origin neighborhood provide information or help that minimize the costs and increase the expected benefits of residential migration after initial displacement. In the absence of social ties, a family may evaluate the costs of settlement in the new environment to be too high and “re-optimize” by moving to a neighborhood that maximizes proximity to social resources. In some cases, this tradeoff is an undesirable but necessary reality for low-income families who feel pressured to be closer to their network peers. These findings suggest that scholars and policymakers should reconsider how social networks shape residential migration and mobility, as well as what it means to live in a disadvantaged neighborhood.

Does School Policy Affect Housing Choices? Evidence From the End of Desegregation in Charlotte–Mecklenburg

We examine whether the legal decision to grant unitary status to the Charlotte–Mecklenburg school district, which led to the end of race-conscious student assignment policies, increased the probability that families with children enrolled in the district would move to neighborhoods with a greater proportion of student residents of the same race as their own children. Motivated by the rich but inconclusive literature on the consequences of educational and residential segregation, we make use of a natural policy experiment—a judicial decision to end court-ordered busing—to estimate the causal impacts of this policy shift on household residential decisions. We find that, for those who moved, the legal decision made White families with children in the Charlotte–Mecklenburg Schools substantially more likely than they were during desegregation to move to a neighborhood with a greater proportion of White residents than their own neighborhood.

Moving for the Kids: Examining the Influence of Children on White Residential Segregation

White households with children are the least likely of all household types to live in integrated neighborhoods, yet few researchers have questioned whether children themselves influence residential decision–making. Children may affect both residential preferences and constraints and in turn, household mobility decisions that shape patterns of segregation and integration. Following a cohort of household heads in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we find that white households whose oldest child is younger than six are more likely to move when the percentage of black residents and diversity in their neighborhoods is higher. However, when white households with children do move, they are not more likely than white households without children to move to neighborhoods with fewer blacks or less diversity. Young children may matter for segregation because they influence families to leave more diverse neighborhoods, and white movers generally move into neighborhoods with less diversity, whether or not they have children.

“Living Here has Changed My Whole Perspective”: How Escaping Inner-City Poverty Shapes Neighborhood and Housing Choice

Research on the housing choice voucher program and housing mobility interventions shows that even with assistance, it is difficult for poor minority families to relocate to, and remain in, low-poverty neighborhoods. Scholars suggest that both structural forces and individual preferences help explain these residential patterns. However, less attention is paid to where preferences come from, and how they respond to policies and social structure to shape residential decisionmaking. In this paper, we use data from fieldwork with 110 participants in the Baltimore Mobility Program (BMP), an assisted mobility voucher program, to demonstrate how residential preferences can shift over time as a function of living in higher opportunity neighborhoods. Since 2003, BMP has helped over 2,000 low-income African American families move from high-poverty, highly segregated neighborhoods in Baltimore City to low-poverty, racially mixed neighborhoods throughout the Baltimore region. Along with intensive counseling and unique program administration, these new neighborhood contexts helped many women to shift what we term residential choice frameworks: the criteria that families use to assess housing and neighborhoods. Parents who participated in the mobility program raised their expectations for what neighborhoods, homes, and schools can provide for their children and themselves. Parents report new preferences for the “quiet” of suburban locations, and strong consideration of school quality and neighborhood diversity when thinking about where to live. Our findings suggest that housing policies should employ counseling to ensure relocation to and sustained residence in low-poverty communities. Our work also underscores how social structure, experience, and policy opportunities influence preferences, and how these preferences, in turn, affect policy outcomes.

Job Accessibility, Employment and Job-Education Mismatch in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona

This paper analyses the effect of job accessibility by public and private transport on labour market outcomes in the metropolitan area of Barcelona. Beyond employment, we consider the effect of job accessibility on job-education mismatch, which represents a relevant aspect of job quality. We adopt a recursive system of equations that models car availability, employment and mismatch. Public transport accessibility appears as an exogenous variable in the three equations. Even though it may reflect endogenous residential sorting, falsification proofs suggest that the estimated effect of public transport accessibility is not entirely driven by the endogenous nature of residential decisions.

Simulation of spatial population dynamics based on labor economics and multi-agent systems: a case study on a rapidly developing manufacturing metropolis

Spatial population dynamics affects resource allocation in urban planning. Simulation of population dynamics can provide useful information to urban planning for rapidly developing manufacturing metropolises. In such a metropolis with a concentration of immigrant labor forces, individual employment choices could have a significant effect on their residential decisions. There remains a need for an efficient method, which can simulate spatial population dynamics by considering the interactions between employment and residential choices. This article proposes an agent-based model for simulation of spatial population dynamics by addressing the influence of labor market on individual residential decisions. Labor economics theory is incorporated into a multi-agent system in this model. The long-term equilibrium process of labor market is established to define the interactions between labor supply and labor demand. An agent-based approach is adopted to simulate the economic behaviors and residential decisions of population individuals. The residential decisions of individuals would eventually have consequences on spatial population dynamics. The proposed model has been verified by the spatial dynamics simulation (2007 to 2010) of Dongguan, an emerging and renowned manufacturing metropolis in the Pearl River Delta, China. The results indicate that the simulated population size and spatial distribution of each town in Dongguan are close to those obtained from census data. The proposed model is also applied to predict spatial population dynamics based on two economic planning scenarios in Dongguan from 2010 to2015. The predicted results provide insights into the population dynamics of this fast-growing region.

CHOOSING HOME FOR SOMEONE ELSE: GUARDIAN RESIDENTIAL DECISION-MAKING

Few things are as important as where you live, where you call home. “Home is where the heart is.” “There is no place like home.” Home can be place where one has “deep-seated ties with family members and close friends” and “a harbor of family traditions.” For a frail, older person or an individual with disabilities, “home” can be a long-standing family residence, but might also be a room in assisted living, a nursing home, group home, or other option where support and services can be provided. Where you live conjures up fundamental values of independence, safety, comfort, and community engagement. A guardian with responsibility for determining where a person with diminished capacity will live takes on a charge that goes to the core of quality of life. Of course, a guardian’s “choice” of where a person will live is set in a constellation of factors that bear on or even dictate the outcome—the person’s expressed preferences, the availability of optimal settings, the financial resources available, the risk involved, the kinds of care and supervision needed, the applicable law and court order, the process of hospital discharge planning, and more. The guardian’s residential decision is set against a backdrop of federal and state long-term care policy. Without available and affordable options, a guardian will be in a bind. The extent to which these settings are readily available is influenced by federal and state priorities and budgets for institutional versus community-based care. The recent recession has put a crimp in available options, especially for low- and moderate-income individuals—which squeezes guardians into making that daunting determination of where “home” will be. By making surrogate residential decisions and providing consent for transitions from one setting to another, guardians are a key piece in the puzzle for policy-makers in designing a workable system for long-term supports and services, and in facilitating the drive toward community-based options.

An Empirical Study on Influencing Factors of Residential Location Choice in Hangzhou, China

With the rapid growth of Chinas real estate industry, the consumer behavior in housing market has become one of the issues with greatest concern to developers and the local government. Because of the problem of data, researches on housing choice behavior from the micro level are limited. In this paper, the author built the Logit model about housing choice of urban resident in Hangzhou, selected three main categories of family characteristics, house characteristics and psychological factors, and with division of the housing location in two ways: concentric urban districts and administrative division. The results show that residential location choice decision is largely affected by most of family characteristics, house characteristics and psychological factors. The administrative division of location has more practical significance than concentric urban districts division. The studys conclusion can provide advices for the government, enterprises, as well as residents making decisions.

Impact of urban planning on household's residential decisions

Interest in assessing the sustainability of socio-ecological systems of urban areas has increased notably, with additional attention generated due to the fact that half the world's population now l...

Tracking neighborhood development and behavioral trends with building permits in Austin, Texas

Local area datasets are becoming more frequently used by planners and policy-makers in analyzing land use and development trends. Records kept by cities and towns are popular for this purpose because they often provide continuous and detailed data. This investigation utilized municipal records to explore how local area datasets and spatial analysis tools, specifically building permits and GIS, may be used to study land development. In order to assess the effectiveness of this analytical method, programs and changes related to development were evaluated to demonstrate potential uses of this municipal data. The City of Austin, Texas, was the context for this study, and the permit records used spanned two decades from 1990 to 2009. The permit dataset was first used to review overall construction activity within the City. The locations of all permits issued in the study period were mapped. The next part of this research consisted of two case studies used to demonstrate how a spatial assessment of growth and development change issues could be done using building permit records in varying scenarios. The Balcones Canyonlands Preserves (BCP) conservation project was assessed as an example of proactive and explicit land use decisions. Conversely, shifting neighborhood demographics and reinvestment provided a scenario for studying the changes that have resulted from residential mobility decisions.

Impact of urban planning on household's residential decisions: An agent-based simulation model for Vienna

Interest in assessing the sustainability of socio-ecological systems of urban areas has increased notably, with additional attention generated due to the fact that half the world's population now lives in cities. Urban areas face both a changing urban population size and increasing sustainability issues in terms of providing good socioeconomic and environmental living conditions. Urban planning has to deal with both challenges. Households play a major role by being affected by urban planning decisions on the one hand and by being responsible – among many other factors – for the environmental performance of a city (e.g. energy use). We here present an agent-based decision model referring to the city of Vienna, the capital of Austria, with a population of about 1.7 million (2.3 million within the metropolitan area, the latter being more than 25% of Austria's total population). Since the early 1990s, after decades of negative population growth, Vienna has been experiencing a steady increase in population, mainly driven by immigration. The aim of the agent-based decision model is to simulate new residential patterns of different household types based on demographic development and migration scenarios. Model results were used to assess spatial patterns of energy use caused by different household types in the four scenarios (1) conventional urban planning, (2) sustainable urban planning, (3) expensive centre and (4) no green area preference. Outcomes show that changes in preferences of households relating to the presence of nearby green areas have the most important impact on the distribution of households across the small-scaled city area. Additionally, the results demonstrate the importance of the distribution of different household types regarding spatial patterns of energy use.

Demography and Educational Politics in the Suburban Marketplace

The demography of public school enrollment continues to change dramatically, with students of color comprising an increasing proportion of the whole. As such, suburbia, with both White and non-White students, is a place in which integration is more possible in the beginning of the 21st century. Due to the intertwined nature of how these factors affect educational politics in suburban districts, we draw on Hirschman's exit-voice-loyalty framework to examine factors influencing residential and education decisions. Drawing on in-depth fieldwork in seven multiracial suburban districts, this article examines how, and whether, the way in which districts define issues related to increasing diversity shapes the actions they take. The article also examines how district jurisdiction affects the implementation of diversity policies as well as the policies themselves. We argue that policymakers’ decision making, both due to the pressure of exit to less diverse suburban districts and the rising voices of more advantaged residents in the suburban marketplace, has increased inequality within districts, particularly those that we call “multimunicipal,” or districts with multiple, disparate municipalities within the district.

Do Smart Growth Strategies Have a Role in Curbing Vehicle Miles Traveled? A Further Assessment Using Household Level Survey Data

Abstract This paper draws on McFadden’s location choice theory and incorporates households’ residential choice decisions as a hierarchical process in a structural travel demand model. The paper argues that such an approach can effectively tackle the problems of self-selection and multicollinearity. Contrary to previous findings, empirical results based on OLS and 3SLS reveal that travel demand is highly elastic to certain smart-growth features, if they are measured at different spatial scales. The results are robust against alternative sequencing of the hierarchical choice process. An analysis of the quantitative impact of a change in the smart-growth and fuel-tax policies reveals significant returns under both policies. Finally, a simulation based on California suggests that smart growth policies substantially reduce household travel demand.

Residential preferences of the ‘creative class’?

The desire for ‘vibrant’, ‘bohemian’ neighbourhoods forms a focal point of the amenity preferences of Richard Florida’s ‘creative class’ thesis. Here, a vibrant street culture, which includes cafes and restaurants spilling onto the pavement, is implied as being of key importance in the selection of a residential area for creative and knowledge workers. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data, this paper examines the residential preferences of the ‘creative class’ in Dublin, Ireland. The results illustrate the continued importance of classic factors in residential decision-making, including housing cost, accessibility and travel-time to place of employment. Moreover, the results also illustrate how changes in the life-cycle, including the decision to have a family, have a direct influence on residential location choice. While there is a tendency for younger workers to select the city centre, older workers predominantly opt to live in suburban areas with good transport connections to the city centre or their place of employment.

Residential Characteristics of Armed-Forces Personnel and the Urban Economy: Evidence from a Medium Sized City in Greece

Residential Characteristics of Armed-Forces Personnel and the Urban Economy: Evidence from a Medium Sized City in GreeceThe paper explores the locational and residential decisions of Greek military households. To achieve this, primary data were collected by means of a questionnaire survey addressed to military personnel located in Volos, a medium-sized Greek city in the greater area of which a number of major military facilities are located. The study starts by examining the residential distribution of military households to consider whether clustering or dispersion is evident. Then, an attempt is made to explain the observed pattern with reference to conventional urban economics' determinants of location choice or to other factors related to the social or professional characteristics of the group. Such analysis enables us to draw some preliminary conclusions on the potential effects military facilities have on both the urban spatial structure and the housing market.

“The Big Sort” That Wasn't: A Skeptical Reexamination

In 2008 journalist Bill Bishop achieved the kind of notice that authors dream about. His book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, was mentioned regularly during the presidential campaign; most notably, former president Bill Clinton urged audiences to read the book. Bishop's thesis is that Americans increasingly are choosing to live in neighborhoods populated with people just like themselves. In turn, these residential choices have produced a significant increase in geographic political polarization. Bishop does not contend that people consciously decide to live with fellow Democrats or Republicans; rather political segregation is a byproduct of the correlations between political views and the various demographic and life-style indicators people consider when making residential decisions. Whatever the cause, Bishop contends that the resulting geographic polarization is a troubling and dangerous development.

Educational constraints of immobility? Examining ethnic differences in student migration in Britain using Census microdata

This paper is situated in the emerging literature on minority/immigrant internal migration which grew from questions about the population dynamics behind ethnic residential segregation. This work has revealed both that migration within Britain is creating ethnic mixing and that there are considerable ethnic differences in levels and geographies of residential mobility. This paper contributes to our understanding of these differences by examining how being a student is related to residential mobility for different ethnic groups. It suggests that different residential decisions and migration norms at the point of entry into higher education partly explain ethnic differences in mobility. Using 2001 Census microdata (Sample of Anonymised Records), the paper finds that minority ethnic students are less mobile than their White counterparts, that being a student increases the probability of migrating for White British and Chinese young adults but decreases the probability of migrating for Pakistani and Black African young adults, and particularly so for Pakistani females. Given that it is common to migrate away from home for University study in Britain, this raises questions about equality of access to Higher Education. The examination of mobility in relation to key life events in young adulthood enables debates about ethnic geographies to move beyond the concern with segregation. The paper concludes with challenges for further research and a discussion of the policy implications of the findings in the context of current changes to Higher Education funding in the UK.

Circuits of education, rural gentrification, and family migration from the global city

Although there is recurring empirical evidence of gentrifier families with young children, the importance of education-related factors in the migration and residential decision-making of rural gentrifiers have yet to be fully examined. Using the case study of Cranbrook, Kent, processes of education-led rural gentrification are revealed that are dominated by ‘counter-Londonising’ in-migrants paying premium property prices to buy into exclusive rural school catchment areas. A rural expression of circuits of education is identified, which, to date, are represented as urban-specific strands of gentrification. Conceptually, the paper sheds light on links between education-led urban and rural gentrification; illuminating counterurban population movements tied to the prioritisation of familial relations and domesticity in perceived child-friendly rural environments.

Residential decision-making and satisfaction among new suburbanites in the Tallinn urban region, Estonia

The prevailing research into suburbanisation in former centrally planned countries explains suburban change by referring to macro-level factors that are evident in the transition from a centrally planned to a market economy. Findings show that in a neo-liberal environment, the public sector plays only a modest role in residential planning; the key players are developers and banks. This study takes a different approach by focusing on the micro-level factors that lead households to move from the city to new, post-Soviet suburban settlements, specifically in the Tallinn urban region of Estonia. A sample of data from the University of Tartu’s 2006 New Residential Areas Survey is herein analysed in order to ascertain the reasons for moving, the criteria used in the selection of a particular suburban settlement, and the subsequent levels of residential satisfaction. The results show that, for the period in question, housing adjustment moves were more prevalent than induced moves triggered by life-course changes. In addition, it was found that, generally, new suburbanites were satisfied with their housing and neighbourhoods. However, they were less satisfied with the provision of local services, especially when their new settlements lay at a distance from pre-transition settlements.

Conceptual Design for an Integrated Geosimulation and Analytic Network Process (ANP) in Gentrification Appraisal

This paper presents a conceptual framework for geosimulation of the New-build gentrification process in an integrated approach. The combination of Multi-Criteria Evaluation (MCE) and Geographic Automata Systems (GAS) facilitates to translate the expert Knowledge into model rules. Analytic Network Process (ANP) is considered as MCE that addresses the relative importance of criteria for New-build gentrification as a complex urban phenomenon. It will be used to determine the different weights of each parameter in every time elapse. GAS which unites Cellular Automata (CA) and Multi-agent Systems (MAS) provides an excellent tool for modeling New-build gentrification. The transition rules are proposed as a combination of land use transformation and residential decision for housing area. The land use change is based on human-agent effects (local authority, neighborhood’s property value and developer) and residential decision is the adaptation of a stress-resistance hypothesis defined by Benenson (2004). The integrated approach is believed to provide a more accurate real-world urban modeling and simulation that can highlight the systematic inequalities of urban context based on the theory of New-build gentrification.