Negotiating Neighborhoods and Evaluating Alternatives: Residential Mobility Decisions of Low-income Families.

Patterns of residential mobility are often used to provide insight into the nature of place stratification in metropolitan areas. Survey-based research into these patterns provides insight into the persistence of segregation and urban inequality, yet it does not tell us very much about the degree to which families making these moves see them as constrained or voluntary. This study uses interviews with participants in the Moving To Opportunity (MTO) experiment in Baltimore, Maryland to explore the context of residential decision making among low-income, African-American families. Previous studies of how families make residential decisions largely consider residential mobility to be a function of utility maximizing behavior, yet theory from the sociology of culture is also used to explore the ways in which social structure interacts with individual behavior to shape residential mobility outcomes. The interviews reveal that low income families often see residential mobility as a chance to maximize space or neighborhood amenities. However, they also highlight how poverty and social class are not just about income constraints. The experience of life in poverty shapes how families see the city and experience neighborhoods, and for many families results in a conflation of social space with geographic space. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]