Moving to a better place? Residential mobility among families with young children in the Millennium Cohort Study

Abstract

This paper assesses how far residential moves can result in improvement or deterioration of the housing and neighbourhood circumstances for families with young children. It uses data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study concentrating on the time between infancy and age 5, 2001 to 2006. First, we ask which families moved home and in what circumstances. We then examine how moving changed several aspects of housing: space standards, damp problems, and tenure. We show that the majority of moves resulted in improvements to housing conditions, especially in reducing overcrowding. We also consider neighbourhood circumstances, proxied by a measure of local poverty at small‐area level. Movers generally ended up in neighbourhoods with lower levels of poverty, or no worse, but almost one fifth of moves were downward or remained in the 30 percent poorest areas. We ask whether locating in an area with more local poverty may help achieve a larger home. There is evidence of such a trade‐off—1 in 5 families moved to a larger home, which was either in a poorer area than before or remained in the 30 percent poorest areas. We conclude by showing how the path of upward housing mobility, while numerically dominant, was far less common among families with relatively low resources and whose moves were attendant on partnership changes. For them, moves often result in smaller homes in poorer areas.

Neighbourhood attainment of children of immigrants in Greater Oslo: Intergenerational inertia and the role of education

“…3 Obviously, this measure suits the U.S. context (at a particular point in time) better than the European context of today. We also find some recent studies of neighbourhood attainment of young adults that base their definitions of the hierarchy of neighbourhoods on local poverty rates (Gambaro, Joshi, & Lupton, 2017;Ham et al, 2014). Quite a few studies use different measures of the central tendency of the local income distribution (Gustafsson et al, 2017;Sampson, 2012;Sharkey, 2008;South, Huang, Spring, & Crowder, 2016).…”

“…Obviously, this measure suits the U.S. context (at a particular point in time) better than the European context of today. We also find some recent studies of neighbourhood attainment of young adults that base their definitions of the hierarchy of neighbourhoods on local poverty rates (Gambaro, Joshi, & Lupton, ; Ham et al, ).…”

Do Children Carry the Weight of Divorce?

“…3Gambaro et al (2017) reported that 40 % of the children in the MCS experienced a residential change before age 5, and more than 60 % of these children experienced an improvement in their residential environment (e.g., a larger house or a better neighborhood). The authors also found an association with parental separation and residential mobility.…”

Ageing by feet? Regional migration, neighbourhood choice and local demographic change in German cities

“…Various determinants of migration and location decisions (or non‐decisions) and mobility constraints (e.g., due to discrimination) remain part of the unobservable characteristics of individuals, households, and neighbourhoods. In a model based on information from observable migration incidents, it will be difficult to account for the constraints that prevent mobility, even though immobility as a response to constraints affects neighbourhood sorting (Gambaro, Joshi, & Lupton, ). Information about “immobile” households, however, will be considered in the following analysis and the characteristics of mobile households will be compared to those of households that had not moved across city boundaries during the previous 15 years.…”