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

Abstract

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.

Working With Them: Small-Scale Landlord Strategies for Avoiding Evictions

“…Other research has documented the trend of large rental real estate companies evicting people en masse (Immergluck et al, 2019;Raymond et al, 2016). Similarly, research focusing on low-income renters has found that evictions and landlord neglect are major factors contributing to displacement and housing insecurity (Deluca, Wood, & Rosenblatt, 2019;Rosenblatt & DeLuca, 2012), and that the reverse is also true-supportive, positive relationships with landlords increase renters' housing stability (Boyd et al, 2010). Our findings add to research focusing on landlords, evictions, and rental housing by showing the various strategies used by landlords to keep tenants who are delinquent on their rent or otherwise violating the terms of the lease in their homes.…”

Losing Your Home Is Bad for Your Health: Short- and Medium-Term Health Effects of Eviction on Young Adults

“…Women, families with children, Black families, families with low incomes, and families living in urban areas are more likely to be evicted than their counterparts (Desmond, 2012a(Desmond, , 2012bDesmond et al, 2013;Hartman & Robinson, 2003;Lundberg & Donnelly, 2019), raising concerns that eviction exacerbates existing social and economic inequalities. Although increasing inequality alone is reason to be concerned about the scope of evictions, researchers find evictions are associated with myriad other negative housing (DeLuca et al, 2019;Desmond, 2016;Sandel et al, 2018), financial (Desmond & Gershenson, Note. The unweighted sample size was 11,514; the weighted sample size was 16,923,811.…”

“…When facing an eviction, families may turn to their relatives (DeLuca et al, 2019) or informal disposable ties with people who were previously strangers (Desmond, 2012a(Desmond, , 2016 for new housing arrangements. The new neighborhoods that evicted families move to are likely to have higher crime rates, and its residents lower average incomes, than their previous neighborhood (Desmond & Shollenberger, 2015).…”

Experiment To Decrease Neighborhood Poverty Had Limited Effects On Emergency Department Use

“…However, the relationship between neighborhood environments and ED use can be difficult to define precisely. Households consider many factors when deciding where to live, such as the availability of affordable housing, 22,23 and these nonrandom decisions about where to live may bias estimates of the observed relationship between neighborhoods and health care use.…”