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1. Creating Moves to Opportunity: Experimental Evidence on Barriers to Neighborhood Choice

   Bergman, Peter; DeLuca, Stefanie; Hendren, Nathaniel; Katz, Lawrence F; Palmer, Christopher (January 2023, American economic review)

   Low-income families in the United States tend to live in neighborhoods that offer limited opportunities for upward income mobility. One potential explanation for this pattern is that families prefer such neighborhoods for other reasons, such as affordability or proximity to family and jobs. An alternative explanation is that they do not move to high-opportunity areas because of a lack of information or barriers that prevent them from making such moves. We test between these explanations using a twophase randomized controlled trial with housing voucher recipients in Seattle and King County. We first provided a bundle of resources to facilitate moves to high-upward-mobility neighborhoods: information about high-opportunity areas, short-term financial assistance, customized assistance during the housing search process, and connections to landlords. This bundled intervention increased the fraction of families who moved to high-upward-mobility areas from 15% in the control group to 53% in the treatment group. To understand the mechanisms underlying this effect, we ran a second phase with three arms: (1) information about high-opportunity areas and financial assistance only; (2) reduced support services in addition to information and financial assistance; and (3) full support services, as in the original bundled intervention. The full services had five times as large a treatment effect as the information and financial incentives treatment and three times as large an effect as the reduced support intervention, showing that high-intensity, customized support enables moves to opportunity. Interviews with randomly selected families reveal that the program succeeded by relaxing families’ bandwidth constraints and addressing their specific needs, from identifying suitable units to providing emotional support to brokering with landlords. Families induced to move to higher opportunity areas tend to stay in their new neighborhoods in subsequent years and report higher levels of neighborhood satisfaction after moving. Our findings imply that many low-income families do not have a strong preference to stay in low-opportunity areas and that barriers in the housing search process are a central driver of residential segregation by income. 

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2. Finding a Home during the Affordable Housing Crisis: How Social Ties Shape Renters’ Housing-Search Outcomes

   https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224241286480  

   Schmidt, Steven (November 2024, American Sociological Review)

   Housing searches play a central role in the reproduction of racial inequality in U.S. cities. Past research finds that movers’ social ties influence residential segregation, as renters receive information about homes located near friends and family. Fewer studies examine how renters’ social ties also provide instrumental assistance during moves, or how this aid unequally shapes moving outcomes. In the present study, I show how 69 low-income, Latina/o and non-Hispanic white renters rely on their friends, family, and acquaintances to navigate moves in Los Angeles, a highly unaffordable rental market. Both groups mobilize their ties for instrumental assistance, but the resources available through renters’ ties contribute to diverging search outcomes. Low-income Latina/o renters’ ties, who also struggled to make ends meet, provided what I call constrained support—referrals to open units, loans to cover moving costs, and informal rental opportunities. This assistance channeled movers to specific apartments and left them negotiating informal, doubled-up homes and new debt. In contrast, low-income white renters leveraged comparatively affluent ties to cosign leases, provide financial gifts, and strengthen applications across buildings—what I refer to as flexible assistance. This aid helped low-income white movers secure housing advantages, while avoiding short-term reciprocal obligations to friends and family. These findings advance research on residential mobility and social support, and they show how network resource inequalities contribute to racial stratification in rental markets. 

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3. Buen Crédito y Buen Seguro: Legal Status and Restricted Access to Shelter among Low-Income Latina/o Renters in an Immigrant Gateway City

   https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spad021  

   Schmidt, Steven (May 2023, Social Problems)

   Abstract Sociologists have shown how searches for rental housing reproduce inequalities by race/ethnicity and household income in the United States. Yet scholars know comparatively less about how legal status may also limit access to shelter. To address this gap, this article compares the housing careers of 30 low-income, undocumented/mixed-status, Mexican, Central American, and South American families with those of ten low-income, predominantly Mexican, U.S. citizen/LPR families across 103 total moves in Los Angeles, California. Though citizen and undocumented renters moved for similar reasons, the process of finding a new home varied substantially across these two groups. Renters’ legal status became salient during the screening portion of rental applications, which requested a credit and background check, a verifiable income, and banking information for each household adult. As a result, undocumented renters were excluded from most formal rentals. Instead, these families searched for sympathetic managers or doubled up with friends, family members, and non-kin. Despite these barriers, undocumented and mixed-status families achieved greater housing security over time by transitioning from guests to hosts in doubled up homes. These findings extend prior research on how housing searches stratify movers, the housing careers of Latino immigrant families, and the punitive consequences of illegality. 

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4. The spatial and social correlates of neighborhood morphology: Evidence from building footprints in five U.S. metropolitan areas

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0299713  

   Durst, Noah J; Sullivan, Esther; Jochem, Warren C (April 2024, PLOS ONE)

   Xu, Gang (Ed.)

   Recent advances in quantitative tools for examining urban morphology enable the development of morphometrics that can characterize the size, shape, and placement of buildings; the relationships between them; and their association with broader patterns of development. Although these methods have the potential to provide substantial insight into the ways in which neighborhood morphology shapes the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of neighborhoods and communities, this question is largely unexplored. Using building footprints in five of the ten largest U.S. metropolitan areas (Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, and Los Angeles) and the open-source R package,foot, we examine how neighborhood morphology differs across U.S. metropolitan areas and across the urban-exurban landscape. Principal components analysis, unsupervised classification (K-means), and Ordinary Least Squares regression analysis are used to develop a morphological typology of neighborhoods and to examine its association with the spatial, socioeconomic, and demographic characteristics of census tracts. Our findings illustrate substantial variation in the morphology of neighborhoods, both across the five metropolitan areas as well as between central cities, suburbs, and the urban fringe within each metropolitan area. We identify five different types of neighborhoods indicative of different stages of development and distributed unevenly across the urban landscape: these include low-density neighborhoods on the urban fringe; mixed use and high-density residential areas in central cities; and uniform residential neighborhoods in suburban cities. Results from regression analysis illustrate that the prevalence of each of these forms is closely associated with variation in socioeconomic and demographic characteristics such as population density, the prevalence of multifamily housing, and income, race/ethnicity, homeownership, and commuting by car. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings and suggesting avenues for future research on neighborhood morphology, including ways that it might provide insight into issues such as zoning and land use, housing policy, and residential segregation. 

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5. The Unequal Availability of Rental Housing Information Across Neighborhoods

   https://doi.org/10.1215/00703370-9357518  

   Besbris, Max; Schachter, Ariela; Kuk, John (July 2021, Demography)

   Abstract As more urban residents find their housing through online search tools, recent research has theorized the potential for online information to transform and equalize the housing search process. Yet, very little is known about what rental housing information is available online. Using a corpus of millions of geocoded Craigslist advertisements for rental housing across the 50 largest metropolitan statistical areas in the United States merged with census tract–level data from the American Community Survey, we identify and describe the types of information commonly included in listings across different types of neighborhoods. We find that in the online housing market, renters are exposed to fundamentally different types of information depending on the ethnoracial and socioeconomic makeup of the neighborhoods where they are searching. 

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