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

Wood, Holly

doi:10.1086/676407

Cited by 26 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 32 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Some parents also looked for signs and newspaper ads that indicated a landlord's willingness to rent to voucher holders—we observed these large colored banners draped on buildings, advertising “Section 8 Welcome!” However, reliance on the housing authority list and landlords who actively target voucher holders also has the secondary effect of channeling households into the poorer and more segregated areas of the city. Recent work suggests that some landlords who own properties in high‐poverty areas aggressively recruit voucher tenants to live there, because the voucher usually pays a higher rent than these units would typically fetch in the private market (Rosen ; Wood ).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…), their limited resources and information about residential options (Krysan and Bader ), and their higher likelihood of forced relocation, the process of choosing where to live is likely different for these families than it is for advantaged households (cf. Wood ). Thus, conventional models of housing choice and moving behaviors may describe how the process works for many households, but clearly fall short to explain how poor minority families secure housing after forced mobility.…”

Section: Review Of Previous Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…See also Rosenblatt and DeLuca (), Boyd et al. (), Wood (), and Rosenblatt and Cossyleon () for more about housing decisions made by low‐income renters.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Why Poor Families Move (And Where They Go): Reactive Mobility and Residential Decisions

2019

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Despite frequent moves, low‐income black families are more likely than any other group to churn among disadvantaged neighborhoods, and the least likely to escape them. Traditional explanations for neighborhood inequality invoke racial preferences and barriers to living in high‐income neighborhoods, but recent work suggests that it is also involuntary mobility—such as eviction—which predicts the neighborhood destinations of poor African American families in urban areas. However, we know little about how individuals actually make residential decisions under such unplanned and constrained conditions. Using longitudinal interviews with low‐income African‐American families residing in Mobile, AL, and Baltimore, MD, we describe the array of factors that lead poor black families to move, and describe how families secure housing in the wake of unplanned mobility. We observe that moving among the poor is more reactive than it is voluntary: Approximately 70 percent of most recent moves are catalyzed by landlords, housing quality failures, and violence. We show how this reactive mobility both accelerates and hampers residential selection in ways that may reproduce neighborhood context and inequality. Where mobility is characterized by a greater degree of agency, we show that the strategies families use to make decisions often prohibit them from investigating a wider range of residential options.

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Review Of Previous Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Why Poor Families Move (And Where They Go): Reactive Mobility and Residential Decisions

2019

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Yet limited economic resources and changing family dynamics meant that families had a hard time staying in these kinds of neighborhoods. Having adequate dwelling space was important, as parents often talked about needing more room as their children and families grew larger (see also Wood 2011 for a discussion of housing unit preferences and parenting among low‐income families). Finding housing with this kind of space was made more difficult by low incomes (appendix Table A1 shows that the average household income was a little over $16,000 a year for members of our qualitative sample).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Mothers often made explicit connections between dwelling space and family management (cf. Wood 2011). Peaches, an experimental group mother of three who worked part time at a uniform company, made her decision about where to move with her MTO voucher based on how big each apartment was, because “my kids are teenagers and I thought … ‘We cannot be bumping into each other in these apartments.’ We definitely need space, so space was the biggest thing for me.” For other parents, having enough space was what kept them in their current unit.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“We Don't Live Outside, We Live in Here”: Neighborhood and Residential Mobility Decisions among Low–Income Families

2012

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Over 20 years of scholarship suggests that living in America's poorest and most dangerous communities diminishes the life course development of children and adults. In the 1990s, the dire conditions of some of these neighborhoods, especially those with large public housing developments, prompted significant policy responses. In addition to the demolition and redevelopment of some of the projects, the federal government launched an experiment to help families leave poor neighborhoods through an assisted housing voucher program called Moving to Opportunity (MTO). While families who moved through this program initially relocated to census tracts with poverty rates almost four times lower than their original projects, many returned to communities of moderate to high poverty. Why? We use mixed methods to explore the patterns and the decision‐making processes behind moves among MTO families. Focusing on the Baltimore MTO site, we find that traditional theories for residential choice did not fully explain these outcomes. While limited access to public transportation, housing quality problems, and landlords made it hard for families to move to, or stay in, low‐poverty neighborhoods, there were also more striking explanations for their residential trajectories. Many families valued the low‐poverty neighborhoods they were originally able to access with their vouchers, but when faced with the need to move again, they often sacrificed neighborhood quality for dwelling quality in order to accommodate changing family needs. Having lived in high‐poverty neighborhoods most of their lives, they developed a number of coping strategies and beliefs that made them confident they could handle such a consequential trade‐off and protect themselves and their children from the dangers of poorer areas.

show abstract

“Living Here has Changed My Whole Perspective”: How Escaping Inner-City Poverty Shapes Neighborhood and Housing Choice

Darrah¹,

DeLuca²

2014

J. Pol. Anal. Manage.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

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

Cited by 26 publications

References 32 publications

Why Poor Families Move (And Where They Go): Reactive Mobility and Residential Decisions

Why Poor Families Move (And Where They Go): Reactive Mobility and Residential Decisions

“We Don't Live Outside, We Live in Here”: Neighborhood and Residential Mobility Decisions among Low–Income Families

“Living Here has Changed My Whole Perspective”: How Escaping Inner-City Poverty Shapes Neighborhood and Housing Choice

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About