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

Abstract

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. Decades of research have demonstrated that the neighborhoods where children grow up play a significant part in shaping their developmental, social, and economic trajectories. Poor and racially segregated neighborhoods diminish children's health and educational prospects, while more affluent communities can increase long-term social and economic mobility (Acevedo

Schools as racialized organizations in policy and practice

“…It is clear from the literature on schooling inequality that race shapes schooling. Students of color, particularly Black and Latinx students, are disproportionately under-represented in well-resourced schools (Bankston & Caldas, 2000;DeLuca & Jang-Trettien, 2020;Dougherty et al, 2009;Emerson et al, 2001). Even among integrated schools, tracking practices place students of color into less rigorous classes than those taken by whites (Lewis & Diamond, 2015;Lewis-McCoy, 2014;Ochoa, 2013).…”

“…In addition to school choice, scholars have also traced several between-school mechanisms that work to maintain unequal access to resources through race and class-based segregation across schools (Kozol, 2005), influenced by decades of redlining and the racial wealth gap (Hao, 2007;Oliver & Shapiro, 2006). Residential segregation blocks Black and Latinx students access to (most often) white, middle-class neighborhoods with higher tax bases, thus creating racial disparities in per-student spending (Bankston & Caldas, 2000;DeLuca & Jang-Trettien, 2020;Dougherty et al, 2009;Emerson et al, 2001). 3 Social scientists have extensively examined the persistent "racial achievement gap, " the trend where Black and Latinx students continually score lower on national tests as compared to their white and Asian counterparts, as linked to disparities in resources across schools (Kao & Thompson, 2003;Merolla & Jackson, 2019).…”

Context in continuity: The enduring legacy of neighborhood disadvantage across generations

“…Continued segregation patterns, under choice theory, are partly a function of residential preferences and the fact that Blacks are often the least preferred neighbors and are therefore often segregated in pockets of poverty and disadvantage (Bobo and Zubrinsky, 1996;Charles, 2001). From this 3 Research documents that poor families often make unplanned housing decisions under strained and evolving conditions related to employment, criminal records, immigration status, and eviction (DeLuca and Jang-Trettien, 2020;DeLuca et al, 2019), all of which further constrain their housing options. Unregulated home transfers outside of the mortgage market in Black neighborhoods may also place buyers in vulnerable positions, further exacerbating racial inequalities in housing (Jang-Trettien, 2021).…”

A novel approach of creating sustainable urban planning solutions that optimise the local air quality and environmental equity in Helsinki, Finland: The CouSCOUS study protocol

“…Moreover, these preferences are likely to change with circumstances and age [e.g. 33 , 37 , 38 ]. It has also been shown that “desirable” neighbourhoods are more easy to predict than, for instance, rural areas [ 39 ].…”