'We Don't Live Outside, We Live in Here': Residential Mobility Decisions of Low-income Families.

Recent policy approaches to ameliorate the effects of concentrated poverty on individual well-being have used housing vouchers to allow families to move to higher opportunity neighborhoods. This paper uses quantitative and qualitative data from the MTO experiment in Baltimore to explore these patterns and the decision making processes behind them in greater detail. While some families made moves to low-poverty areas that persisted over time, the majority moved back to higher poverty or more segregated neighborhoods. Structural constraints like access to public transportation or ease of finding a place to use the voucher explain some of the reasons families ended up where they did. Yet we also find that families think of neighborhoods as only one component in a balancing act that is influenced by the constraints of life in poverty. Previous studies of how families make residential decisions largely consider residential mobility to be an example of utility maximizing behavior. To extend this, we explore how social structure interacts with individual behavior to shape residential mobility outcomes. The data support the notion that these families negotiate a constrained form of choice. On the one hand, low income families often see residential mobility as a chance to increase safety or maximize dwelling space. However, the interviews also highlight how poverty and socioeconomic status are not only about income constraints, but are also factors that shape families' perceptions about the opportunities that neighborhoods can provide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]