Residential Mobility Decisions Research Articles

A life-course approach to assessing residential mobility dynamics in selected immigrant communities in Kumasi, Ghana

This paper responds to the emerging concerns of residential dissonance character by examining the position and influence of the “life-course” framework of households on residential mobility decisions and the conjunct attainment of subjective well-being in their current and anticipated residential locations. Using data from a cross-sectional survey design and adopting a multi-stage sampling procedure, a comparative study of 397 households from immigrant communities within the Kumasi metropolis is conceptualized. Results from the study revealed contrasting variabilities in the push and pull factors influencing households' relocation experiences and decisions to move. Also, the likelihood of households relocating over the life course was significantly anchored on the employment stage. Thus, decision-making proxies for households' relocation intentions, preparedness, and realizing actual moves were noticeably rapid decisions during active employment life. The study further found that the associated perception of attaining subjective well-being attached to a household's anticipated residential locations was significantly higher than that of their current residence. On the premise of these empirical contributions, the paper outlines how findings could ultimately inform the development of sustainable urban growth management and shape housing mobility planning policies for rapidly growing regions within the global south.

Next to kin: How children influence the residential mobility decisions of older adults

This paper explores the residential mobility of older adults, with a focus on the influence of distance to children on those decisions. Using the geocoded Health and Retirement Study, we statistically estimate the importance of adult child proximity on older adult moves after controlling for a host of other factors. We find that having adult children nearby is associated with a lower propensity to move, with closer proximity generally having a stronger negative relationship, up to a distance of 50 miles. These results are more pronounced if we define mobility as having moved at least 30 miles, or across metropolitan areas. We also show that the relationship is stronger for those with care needs, and for renters compared with homeowners. Results for the baby boomer cohort suggest that the proximity of children continues to have an important influence on older adult mobility among more recent cohorts of older adults.

Modeling residential mobility decisions from a life history–oriented perspective

ABSTRACT It is critical to investigate residential mobility decisions to better understand the residential relocation. Mobility is identified as a vital component of the integrated transportation-land use modeling. However, limited studies capture the longer-term temporal changes during the household’s life-course. This study adopts a life history–oriented approach to investigate effects of life-trajectory dynamics on mobility. The advanced hazard-based model captures heterogeneity and accommodates effects of repeated spells along the life-course of households. The model uses data from a retrospective survey conducted in Central Okanagan region of British Columbia, Canada. Parameter estimation results confirm effects of life-cycle events, sociodemographics, and accessibility. For instance, households might be active in housing market following the birth of a child. The model confirms the existence of heterogeneity. For example, urban dwellers might trigger a move following the marriage of a household member; in contrast, suburban dwellers might continue to have a longer duration of stay.

Best Laid Plans: How the Middle Class Make Residential Decisions Post-Disaster

Abstract Middle-class households typically search for housing with an eye to long-term residence and are able to maintain a high level of stability, but what happens when these households are forced to make mobility decisions after exposure to a disaster and subsequent residential displacement? Through longitudinal interviews with 59 households in a middle-class suburb of Houston that flooded during Hurricane Harvey, we found that residential mobility decisions—whether to stay and rebuild or move—were guided by households’ durable plans about the future. The majority of households decided to remain and rebuild their homes, despite the ability to move and pressure from friends and family to relocate to less vulnerable places with similar amenities. The households that stayed had long-term plans to remain in their homes before the flood, while the small number who decided to move generally had well-defined plans to do so in the near future before the storm hit. Our findings reveal the role of plans in the residential decision-making of middle-class households and have implications for understanding post-disaster immobility at a time when middle-class households are increasingly exposed to environmental disasters.

“Not Just a Lateral Move”: Residential Decisions and the Reproduction of Urban Inequality

Despite decades of research on residential mobility and neighborhood effects, we know comparatively less about how people sort across geography. In recent years, scholars have been calling for research that considers residential selection as a social stratification process. In this paper, we present findings from work our team has done over the last 17 years to explore how people end up living where they do, relying in large part on systematically sampled in–depth narrative interviews with families. We focus on four key decisions: whether to move; where to move; whether to send children to school in the neighborhood; and whether to rent or own a home. We found that many residential mobility decisions among the poor were “reactive,” with unpredictable shocks forcing families out of their homes. As a result of reactive moving, housing search time frames became shorter and poor parents employed short–term survival solutions to secure housing instead of long–term investment thinking about neighborhood and school district quality. These shocks, constraints, and compressed time frames led parents to decouple some dimensions of neighborhoods and schools from the housing search process while maximizing others, like immediacy of shelter, unit quality, and proximity to work and child care. Finally, we found that policies can significantly shape and better support some of these decisions. Combined, our research revealed some of the processes that underlie locational attainment and the intergenerational transmission of neighborhood context.

Calling from the outside: The role of networks in residential mobility

Using anonymised cellphone data, we study how social networks shape residential mobility decisions. Individuals with few local contacts are more likely to change residence. Movers strongly prefer neighbourhoods where they already know more people nearby. Contacts matter because proximity to them is valuable and makes attractive locations more enjoyable. They also provide hard-to-find local information and reduce frictions, especially in home-search. Effects are not driven by similar people being more likely to be friends and move between certain locations. Recently-moved and more central contacts are particularly influential. With age, proximity to family gains importance over friends.

The College Promise in Communities: Do Place-based Scholarships Affect Residential Mobility Patterns?

Place-based scholarships within the College Promise movement reduce the cost of college for students in particular places and often include incentives for families to live in places for a longer period of time to capture full program benefits. This financial incentive may change the residential mobility decisions of people living in and around Promise-targeted locations, potentially affecting a community’s composition and who can benefit from the scholarship. We use difference-in-differences with census tract-level data from the American Community Survey to assess whether the New Haven Promise, Say Yes Buffalo, or La Crosse Promise affect residential mobility based on household income, race/ethnicity, and age in their respective cities. We find evidence of overall in-migration due to program introduction, driven by the Say Yes Buffalo program, but corresponding decreases in those staying in treated Buffalo and La Crosse census tracts. Further, we find that White, high income residents are more likely to stay in New Haven to take advantage of the program. We also find a potential displacement effect in La Crosse for families with children, suggesting that originally targeted residents moved out the Promise-targeted areas, but that new families with children moved in as a result of the program. Overall, our short-term impacts suggest that since moving is expensive, higher income families are more likely to benefit from these programs than their lower income counterparts by having more control of whether, when, and where to move. Implications for communities and program (re)design are discussed.

To move against the odds: A portrait of socio-spiritual underpinnings of residential mobility decisions in pro-poor housing systems of Tamale, Ghana

Housing mobility is an overlooked aspect of pro-poor housing policy debates despite the growing complexities of downstream housing sectors in cities of the global South. Stable housing regimes confer multiple socio-economic advantages on households and the incidence of housing relocation, especially involving very poor families, foists a considerably disruptive consequence. In the mainstream academic literature, residential mobility of the poor is believed to be firmly rooted in the agency of households and the associated housing outcomes arguably reflect their considered choices. Scholars have contended that residential mobility is a progressive practice in which people seek improvement in housing outcomes in terms of unit price, quality and tenure. This notion led to the suggestion that poor households are unlikely to move housing due to resource constraints. These perspectives may have overlooked the complex matrix of spiritual beliefs and practices which condition housing consumption and residential mobility decisions in the pro-poor housing sector. This paper analyses the sociocultural and spiritual enablers of housing mobility decisions in the pro-poor housing system of Tamale, Ghana, using data from in-depth interviews with selected survey participants. The analysis suggests that mistrust and socio-cultural practices in which people seek alternative interpretations to life events and misfortunes in the spiritual realm, deepens the sense of dissatisfaction with respect to safety and security of the homes they live in. We argue that spiritual interpretations of life circumstances create and sustain anxiety in the pro-poor housing sector and mark the subject on which housing relocation decisions are predicated. Housing policy debates ought to be broadened beyond the objective aspects of housing and environmental services to include the socio-cultural contexts shaping housing practices in the pro-poor sector.

Life Cycles and Gender in Residential Mobility Decisions

Using household survey data from the recent economically depressed period, we attempt to identify typical household characteristics by residential type and study whether households change their residence at different stages of life. We find that the general trend in residential choice is influenced by socioeconomic background. The results of a multinomial probit estimation highlight that the probability of homeownership is higher in rural areas and increases with age of household heads, financial wealth, and family size. In contrast, the probability of renting a house is higher in urban areas and among female households. Moreover, it is observed that people adjust residential size despite market imperfections. The dwelling size increases with age of household heads and declines once they reach retirement age; however, the residential mobility is low at older ages. Furthermore, there are gender differences in terms of attitudes toward downsizing residences; female households are more willing to accept downsizing than are male households.

To move or not to move? Residential mobility of rural migrants in a medium-sized Chinese city: the case of Yangzhou

This article evaluates the residential mobility decisions of rural migrants with a history of living in urban villages in Yangzhou City, Jiangsu province. Many were displaced by its demolition–redevelopment policy (forced movers); some chose to move voluntarily to improve their housing utility (voluntary movers); others decided to stay put in substandard housing (voluntary non-movers). A survey of their current housing conditions revealed that, compared to voluntary non-movers, most forced movers had not become better-off. But the voluntary movers had done much better than both of the other groups, implying that a timely move could have led to their improved housing conditions. However, even voluntary moves proved to have a downside, namely, that voluntary migrants would likely end up living somewhere more remote from coveted facilities and locations of jobs in the inner city. Logistic regression analysis showed how differences in socio-demographic characteristics between voluntary movers and non-movers could explain why some decided to move. For those who decided to stay, the analysis also indicates how the advantages of the current location may compensate for housing deficiencies. These results correspond to the motives migrants expressed in supplementary in-depth interviews: migrants intending to become permanent residents were most likely to move for better housing. The findings also point to structural constraints on residential mobility. For poor migrants without a Jiangsu hukou, moving to better housing was simply not an option. This suggests that further hukou reform is needed if urban redevelopment is not only meant to improve the image of the city but also the migrants’ housing conditions.

Influence of Proximity to Kin on Residential Mobility and Destination Choice: Examining Local Movers in Metropolitan Areas

A growing body of research has examined how family dynamics shape residential mobility, highlighting the social-as opposed to economic-drivers of mobility. However, few studies have examined kin ties as both push and pull factors in mobility processes or revealed how the influence of kin ties on mobility varies across sociodemographic groups. Using data on local residential moves from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) from 1980 to 2013, we find that location of noncoresident kin influences the likelihood of moving out of the current neighborhood and the selection of a new destination neighborhood. Analyses of out-mobility reveal that parents and young adult children living near each other as well as low-income adult children living near parents are especially deterred from moving. Discrete-choice models of neighborhood selection indicate that movers are particularly drawn to neighborhoods close to aging parents, white and higher-income households tend to move close to parents and children, and lower-income households tend to move close to extended family. Our results highlight the social and economic trade-offs that households face when making residential mobility decisions, which have important implications for broader patterns of inequality in residential attainment.

Residential mobility

Research into health disparities has long recognized the importance of residential mobility as a crucial factor in determining health outcomes. However, a lack of connectivity between the health and mobility literatures has led to a stagnation of theory and application on the health side, which lacks the detail and temporal perspectives now seen as critical to understanding residential mobility decisions. Through a critical re-think of mobility processes with respect to health outcomes and an exploitation of longitudinal analytical techniques, we argue that health geographers have the potential to better understand and identify the relationship that residential mobility has with health.

Spatial Transferability of a Microresidential Mobility Model in the Integrated Land Use, Transportation, and Environment Modeling System

This paper presents the spatial transferability analysis of a micro-behavioral model from the residential mobility component of the integrated land use, transportation, and environment (ILUTE) modeling system developed and implemented in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, Ontario, Canada. The study examined whether ILUTE could be spatially transferred with the current model components to a different geographic area: Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The residential mobility component within ILUTE is a continuous-time, hazard-based duration model, developed with retrospective survey data from the Residential Mobility Survey 2 in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. This study developed a similar continuous-time, hazard-based duration model for the residential mobility decisions of households in Halifax on the basis of retrospective survey data from a household mobility and travel survey. The model results suggested that households in Halifax and the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area exhibited profound differences in residential mobility decisions. Sociodemographic, dwelling, and neighborhood characteristics significantly affected residential mobility decisions in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. The effects of land use and accessibility measures were noteworthy for Halifax. For instance, home-to-work distances in Halifax affected the decision to move; however, such an effect could not be confirmed in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. Households' first periods of residence after household formation in a residential location were shorter in Halifax than in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. It was concluded that the direct transfer of micromodels from one spatial context to another could be difficult.

Selective mobility, segregation and neighbourhood effects

Selective mobility, segregation and neighbourhood effects

Selective mobility, segregation and neighbourhood effects

Selective mobility, segregation and neighbourhood effects

Selective mobility, segregation and neighbourhood effects

Selective mobility, segregation and neighbourhood effects

Concerns for self or family? Sources of and responses to altruistic fear.

While the vast majority of research on the causes and consequences of fear of crime has been focused on personal fears, Warr and Ellison have suggested that fears for one's family are both more common and more important in explaining protective actions like gun ownership. The present work not only provides new evidence supporting these findings but also expands our understanding of altruistic fears in two important directions: by exploring the potential sources of such fears in exposure to crime and by exploring new potential responses to such fears, including residential mobility decisions. The results suggest that altruistic fears are rooted in personal experiences with victimization and personal evaluations of the local danger posed by crime-though the ways that people react to victimizations depend on their opportunities for personal versus altruistic fears. In turn, altruistic fears are associated with taking protective measures, withdrawing from local organizational participation, and the desire and intent to flee neighborhoods altogether. However, the article also acknowledges important independent roles for personal fears and cognitive evaluations of danger, ultimately recommending a more holistic perspective on reactions to crime.

When Only a House Makes a Home: How Home Selection Matters in the Residential Mobility Decisions of Lower-Income, Inner-City African American Families

The correlation between neighborhood poverty and poor life-course outcomes is well documented. However, when examining residential mobility, scholars frequently neglect the role of dwelling in housing decisions and its potential contribution to the reproduction of concentrated poverty. Based on in-depth interviews with 40 lower-income African American mothers residing in Baltimore, this article illustrates how resource-constrained households give priority to dwelling attributes (including size, type, and unit amenities) when conducting a housing search and then satisfice on neighborhood-level criteria. This elucidates why some households remain in resource-poor neighborhoods even when they acquire the means to live in more affluent areas. The mothers’ narratives further reveal the strategies they use to mitigate their perception of neighborhood danger, allowing their residential selection to pivot primarily on fulfilling perceived dwelling needs. This research widens sociological awareness to a broader range of mechanisms reproducing neighborhood inequality and also offers new insight as to why housing policy often fails to deconcentrate poverty.

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.

Getting on their bikes? The labour market as a driver of the residential mobility decisions of residents in deprived neighbourhoods

In recent times, interest in residential mobility in deprived neighbourhoods has grown in both the academic and policy communities in the UK. Members of both communities have argued that the labour market should be a key driver of mobility in deprived neighbourhoods, as they house a disproportionately large number of workless residents, a population group who should be willing to ‘get on their bikes’ and move to areas with greater employment opportunities. This paper provides an insight into whether they are, by drawing on data gleaned from residents living in six deprived neighbourhoods across the UK. It finds the labour market not to be an important driver of either past or anticipated mobility. Furthermore, for those residents who had ‘got on their bikes’ and moved relatively long distances to reside in their current neighbourhood, it did not appear to be a significant contributory factor behind their decision to do so.