Despite decades of research on residential mobility and neighborhood effects, we know comparatively less about how people sort across geography. In recent years, scholars have been calling for research that considers residential selection as a social stratification process. In this paper, we present findings from work our team has done over the last 17 years to explore how people end up living where they do, relying in large part on systematically sampled in–depth narrative interviews with families. We focus on four key decisions: whether to move; where to move; whether to send children to school in the neighborhood; and whether to rent or own a home. We found that many residential mobility decisions among the poor were “reactive,” with unpredictable shocks forcing families out of their homes. As a result of reactive moving, housing search time frames became shorter and poor parents employed short–term survival solutions to secure housing instead of long–term investment thinking about neighborhood and school district quality. These shocks, constraints, and compressed time frames led parents to decouple some dimensions of neighborhoods and schools from the housing search process while maximizing others, like immediacy of shelter, unit quality, and proximity to work and child care. Finally, we found that policies can significantly shape and better support some of these decisions. Combined, our research revealed some of the processes that underlie locational attainment and the intergenerational transmission of neighborhood context.

中文翻译：

---

“不仅仅是横向移动”：住宅决策和城市不平等的再现

尽管对住宅流动性和邻里效应进行了数十年的研究，但我们对人们如何跨地域进行分类的了解相对较少。近年来，学者们一直呼吁将住宅选择视为社会分层过程的研究。在本文中，我们展示了我们的团队在过去 17 年中所做的工作的结果，以探索人们最终如何生活在他们所居住的地方，这在很大程度上依赖于对家庭进行系统抽样的深度叙事访谈。我们专注于四个关键决策：是否搬家；搬到哪里去；是否送孩子到附近上学；以及是否租房或拥有房屋。我们发现，穷人的许多住宅出行决定是“被动的”，不可预测的冲击迫使家庭离开家园。由于被动移动，寻找住房的时间框架变得更短，贫穷的父母采用短期生存解决方案来确保住房，而不是考虑社区和学区质量的长期投资。这些冲击、限制和压缩的时间框架导致父母将社区和学校的某些方面与住房搜索过程脱钩，同时最大限度地提高其他方面，例如住房的即时性、单元质量以及靠近工作和托儿所。最后，我们发现政策可以显着影响和更好地支持其中一些决策。综上所述，我们的研究揭示了构成位置成就和邻里环境的代际传递的一些过程。