Residential Immobility in High-Poverty Neighborhoods: Narratives of Staying in Place

Background and Purpose: While low-income people move more frequently than those with higher incomes, many are residentially immobile, remaining in the same location over time. In the United States, nearly 80 percent of low-income adults stay put in a given year (Ihrke and Faber 2012). Despite considerable immobility, researchers tend to focus on the residential mobility of low-income people. To be sure, understanding the causes and consequences of residential mobility and the long-term, multigenerational patterns of movement between high-poverty neighborhoods is necessary for policy and scholarship. Such research identifies the predictors of housing instability that can be targeted to curb homelessness and other forms of housing insecurity. Still, focusing on residential mobility without developing a deeper understanding of residential immobility means that researchers know less about the factors that keep low-income individuals in the same neighborhoods over time, including whether immobility is a voluntary choice or the result of involuntary forces that restrict mobility. This paper directly examines the residential immobility of low-income residents by focusing on their narratives of staying put. 

Methods: I draw from 33 qualitative interviews with residents of two high-poverty neighborhoods in Detroit. All participants were 18 years of age or older and had resided in their neighborhoods for at least one year. Nearly all participants were renters (91%), most were African American (91%), and a little over half were female (57%). The ages of participants ranged from 18 to 73, with a mean age of 48. I used a variety of methods to recruit participants, including flyer distribution, street-based sampling, and snowball sampling. All interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim, and transcripts were coded in NVivo 10.

Findings: Results from qualitative interviews show that neighborhood context gives rise to a unique set of reasons why residents want to either stay put or move out of their neighborhoods. For residents who lived in a neighborhood with recent residential and commercial growth, strong positive neighborhood sentiments were the primary – and often only – motivation for wanting to remain in place. In contrast, residents who lived in a neighborhood with long-term decline constructed a broad narrative for staying put. Their narratives frequently addressed one or more factors, including a desire “to be stable”; social ties with friends, family, and neighbors; constrained choices (perceiving their neighborhood as good as or better than other options); and involuntary immobility.

Conclusions and Implications: These results have implications for place-based and people-based housing policies as well as for “shrinking cities.” Because staying put represents a voluntary choice for many low-income residents, it is necessary to focus on and augment the factors that keep residents stably housed, namely improving neighborhood characteristics. At the same time, many shrinking cities like Detroit have limited funds available to improve the quality of all neighborhoods. For low-income people who experience involuntarily immobility, increasing access to housing choice vouchers is warranted. Findings from this study support a balanced approach to place-based and people-based housing policies, particularly for shrinking cities.