The Encyclopedia of Housing

Residential Location

Contributors: Rachel Garshick Kleit

Edited by: Andrew T. Carswell
Book Title: The Encyclopedia of Housing
Chapter Title: "Residential Location"
Pub. Date: 2012
Access Date: April 3, 2019
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.
City: Thousand Oaks
Print ISBN: 9781412989572
Online ISBN: 9781452218380
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452218380.n210
Print pages: 609-610
© 2012 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online
version will vary from the pagination of the print book.
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A house is located on a street, which is located in an immediate neighborhood, and that neighborhood in a
city or town, and a county, and all of those areas within a region. Thus, residential location can vary in scale
from the street address to the larger locales that surround a house. Each of those levels of geography brings
with them sets of economic and social opportunities. Given those opportunities, residential location may in-
fluence the life chances of individuals, children's access to good schools, the social relationships in which
people engage, access to city services, and quality of life. Living in urban neighborhoods of extreme racial
and economic segregation may produce both social and economic isolation for the extremely poor.

While residential location may influence an individual's social and economic opportunities, residential location
itself results from a search for housing. The location decision process involves a series of trade-offs that en-
compass a range of personal considerations, including safety, preferences, access to work, and travel con-
siderations. Such trade-offs are the resolution of stress between housing needs and housing characteristics,
including attributes of the areas surrounding a house. Generally, people at different levels of income and ed-
ucation may value different things when making residential location decisions. Those who live in poverty may
value security and safety over other considerations compared with the general population. Additionally, res-
idential racial and economic segregation influences both the impact of residential location on people's lives
and the factors people consider when making tradeoffs as part of their residential location decisions.

The Impact of Residential Location

Residential location can influence people's economic opportunities and social relationships. At a large geo-
graphic scale, living in different regions provides distinct combinations of opportunities that exist only in that
place. Regions vary in the cost of living and housing and also in the available natural amenities. Additional-
ly, urban and rural places are different in the job opportunities they contain, the social relationships among
people who live in them, and levels of political representation available. Urban regions contain concentrations
of employment and business activities, sometimes with specialized clusters of industries arising that employ
people with particular skills, whereas rural places are often at the fringes of such activity. Typically, residents
of urban areas are less involved with their neighbors than are residents of more rural small towns, turning to
neighbors only if they find them compatible in some way. To the extent that national political representation
depends on density, rural areas can be underrepresented. At the same time, people in rural places can be
much more involved in local governance.

Living in an urban region does not guarantee access to economic opportunities. In 1968, John Kain's work
highlighted the potential impacts of residential location on access to work in urban regions. He suggested that
a mismatch existed between the location of jobs and the residential location of African Americans, spawning
decades of research on the topic. The spatial mismatch is only one mechanism potentially responsible for
such neighborhood effects: a lack of exposure to the middle class, contagion effects spurring the spread of
delinquent behaviors from person to person, and the formation of alternative subcultures that support behav-
iors that differ from the mainstream. A broad literature investigates a wide array of neighborhood effects on
the lives of the poor, placing residential location—both in terms of a neighborhood's connections to surround-
ing urban regions and with regard to local neighborhood economic opportunities—as centrally important, es-
pecially for children.

Both Kain's work and legal cases arising as a result of the Fair Housing Act brought attention to the implica-
tions of residential location for African Americans. By the 1980s, concerns about the impact of impoverished
residential locations on life chances led to policy experimentation in the 1990s to use affordable housing pro-
grams to alter the income mix and quality of the neighborhoods in which poor, government subsidized resi-
dents lived. Subsidized housing was no longer only about responding to the Housing Act of 1949's mandate
for decent housing for all Americans, but now it was concerned with the neighborhood that contained govern-
ment-sponsored, subsidized affordable housing. The hope was that better residential locations would result in
more success in reducing the poverty of recipients of federal housing subsidies. Therefore, in the early 1990s,
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U.S. affordable housing policy added residential mobility goals to its demand-side subsidy program that subsi-
dized rents of poor households in the private market. Similarly, the HOPE VI program responded to a growing
trend to build new affordable housing in developments that contained a range of income levels. However, the
results of the 10-year Moving to Opportunity Demonstration (begun in 1994), which tested whether moving
poor public housing residents to nonpoor residential locations would better their families’ lives, suggest that
changes of residential location alone are not enough to alter the trajectory of poverty for poor adults or ensure
better schools for their children. The study suggested, however, that such moves are helpful for girls’ sense
of safety.

While social scientists disagree over the extent of neighborhood effects on the lives of the poor, residential
location does matter with regard to equity of access to the varied opportunities that exist in metropolitan re-
gions, especially in areas of high poverty concentration or racial segregation. As metropolitan regions contin-
ue to grow through suburbanization, most metropolitan areas increase the number of cities and towns. Such
governmental fragmentation, combined with the evolution of often economically and racially homogenous ju-
risdictions, makes residential location a concern for the equity of access to quality schools and local services.
Those people with the greatest mobility and resources are able to take advantage of the growth of urban re-
gions, while those who have little of either are more bound to the opportunities available where they live.

Components of Residential Location Choice

Housing choices vary over the life course, with housing needs and preferences adjusting in response to
changes in household composition. As preferences and needs change, so does satisfaction with one's hous-
ing or neighborhood; one response is to alter one's residential location. Yet family composition, housing, and
jobs influence each other as sets of linked choices; changes in one may trigger changes in another. Within the
household, the composition—whether the household has children, two parents, seniors, or infants—as well
as its size and income all influence the choice of whether or where to move and to what type of physical struc-
ture. All these choices are based upon an understanding of the constraints and opportunities available. Ex-
ternal to the household, the cost of housing, opportunities for work, quality of schools, availability of services
and amenities, and transportation systems all impose such constraints and opportunities. Thus, households
make trade-offs encompassing a range of considerations, including safety, access to work and services, and
travel considerations, as they resolve stress between household needs and housing characteristics. People
tend to look for neighborhoods that balance social comfort and closeness to jobs, with social comfort often
out-weighing employment access.

For the poor and some racial or ethnic minorities, the factors included in these trade-offs and the weights giv-
en to the options may be different than what we would see in the general population. Household dissolution,
abuse, corrupt landlords, disruptive neighbors, safety, and debt more frequently force changes in residential
location for marginalized groups. It is likely that marginalized populations have more exposure to the stressful
aspects of housing than the general population, and they may weigh safety and security more heavily in their
residential location decisions than does the general population.

Race, Residential Segregation, and Residential Location

Decisions
Real or perceived racial discrimination may limit the residential location choices of individuals and their fam-
ilies. Depending on an individual's race and the racial makeup of a given neighborhood, an individual may
self-limit his or her choices of residential locations, anticipating that he or she will experience discrimination
or be uncomfortable socially. Alternatively, historic patterns of residential settlement within a region may al-
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so limit housing options for minorities. Experience and expectations may be important for determining where
households look for housing. Those expectations may lead some within minority groups to search for housing
primarily in neighborhoods where their group is dominant or neighborhoods with mixed racial composition. In
discussing this dynamic, Camille Zubrinsky Charles comments that racial homogeneity can provide the com-
fort of familiarity while acting as a buffer against potential hostility.

These individual-level choices may reflect larger societal processes. Three alternative frameworks describe
the structural forces that may shape location choices of African Americans. First, non-Whites’ decisions to
move into primarily White areas can be part of a general process of socioeconomic and cultural process of as-
similation in which minority group members seek to convert human capital and socioeconomic resources into
desired residential outcomes. Second, the interaction of social and income inequality may allow more advan-
taged groups to choose residential locations that are distant from those of less advantaged groups. In short,
socioeconomic status matters for where people move. The higher a mover's income, regardless of race, the
more likely the move will be to a White or mixed neighborhood. Third, across metropolitan areas, housing
quality varies across neighborhoods or jurisdictions. Some places have new housing, some have older but
well preserved housing, and others have dilapidated housing units. Some places have more rental vacancies
or houses for sales. These large-scale housing market differences can structure individual housing choices.

In short, place and race interact to influence individual preferences and subsequent residential location
choice, with the result that patterns of residential moves vary by race. Some research suggests that African
Americans move less frequently than Whites, due to differences in the presence of extended family locally.
People of color and Whites with the same purchasing power may make different choices of housing and res-
idential location. The implication is that both an individual's own race and the racial composition of the desti-
nation options are important in decision making about residential location.

• residential location
• neighborhoods
• neighborhood effects
• housing need
• affordable housing
• subsidized housing
• households

Rachel Garshick Kleit

http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452218380.n210
See also

• Demand-Side Subsidies
• Fair Housing Act
• HOPE VI
• Housing Act of 1949
• Moving to Opportunity
• Residential Mobility
• Residential Preferences
• Segregation
• Suburbanization

Further Readings

Briggs, X. d. S. (Ed.). (2005). The geography of opportunity: Race and housing choice in metropolitan Ameri-

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ca. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

Charles, C. Z. (2005). Can we live together? Racial preferences and neighborhood outcomes. In X. d.
S.Briggs (Ed.), The geography of opportunity: Race and housing choice in metropolitan America (pp. 45–80).
Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Clark, W. A. V., & Dieleman, F. M. (1996). Households and housing: Choice and outcomes in the housing
market. New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research.
Fischer, C. S. (1982). To dwell among friends. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Glaeser, E. L., Hanushek, E. A., & Quigley, J. M. (2004). Opportunities, race, and urban location: The influ-
ence of John Kain. Journal of Urban Economics, 56 (1), 70–79.
Jencks, C., & Mayer, S. E. (1990). The social consequences of growing up in a poor neighborhood. In
L.LynnJr. & M. G. H.McGeary (Eds.), Inner-city poverty in the United States (pp. 111–186). Washington, DC:
National Academy Press.
Squires, G. D. (Ed.). (2002). Urban sprawl: Causes, consequences, and policy responses. Washington, DC:
Urban Institute Press.
Wilson, W. J. (1987). The truly disadvantaged. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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