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. While there are reasons for lagging developments in the area of residential decisions, we join others in calling for research to consider residential selection as a social stratification process-one ripe with significant conceptual and policy potential. 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. 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, time frames became shorter as poor parents employed short-term survival solutions to secure housing instead of long-term investment thinking about neighborhood quality and schools. These shocks, constraints, and shorter time frames led parents to decouple important aspects of neighborhood and school quality 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 have a significant impact on some of these decisions. Combined, our research revealed some of the decision-making processes that underlie locational attainment and the intergenerational transmission of neighborhood context.