Are We Moving Back to the City? Examining Residential Mobility in the Washington, DC Metropolitan Area

Abstract

This research assesses the extent to which there is evidence of population re-centralization or back to the city moves by tracking the historical trend of household and income mobility in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. County-to-county migration data and four migration efficiency measures are used to investigate net flows of households and income in the region. The results show a nascent tendency of back to the city movement; however, the redistribution of households and income in the metropolitan area is more complex. While the region's core may be starting to gain households and income, there are still significant flows into the region's most distant suburbs. The results of this research have implications for transportation, housing, and economic development policy making in Washington, DC and other regions. The study also offers a unique example of how to study household and income redistribution within U.S. metropolitan areas.g row_543 48..71

A resurgence in urban living? Trends in residential location patterns of young and older adults since 2000

“…Most of the research cited here relies on simple, crude characterizations of urban and suburban neighborhoods, typically relying on United States Census data on urban and suburban counties (Henderson, 2015;Sturtevant & Jung, 2011), downtowns and downtown-adjacent neighborhoods only (Baum-Snow & Hartley, 2016;Couture & Handbury, 2015), or analyses of residential population densities without regard to land use mix or transportation system characteristics (Kolko, 2016b). But such characterizations tell us little about the neighborhood qualitiesmixed-use, amenity-rich walkable neighborhoods with good transit servicethought by planners to attract young adults to urban living.…”

The back-to-the-city movement: Neighbourhood redevelopment and processes of political and cultural displacement

“…This trend has been called the back-to-thecity movement (Sturtevant and Jung, 2011), the urban turnaround (Simmons and Lang, broaden municipal tax bases (Logan and Molotch, 2007;Peterson, 1981); however, one unresolved puzzle of the back-to-thecity movement is the primary consequences of population influx to cities and their neighbourhoods.…”

Accounting for central neighborhood change, 1980–2010

“…A broad literature across the social sciences documents the "back to the city movement" (Sturtevant & Jung, 2011) and considers the consequences of urban gentri…cation (e.g. Hyra, 2008;Birch, 2009;McKinnish et al, 2010).…”