"Exploring Spatial Dynamics of Neighborhood Migration"

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This proposal describes a program of research designed to explore the impacts of extra-local contextual conditions - characteristics of areas surrounding the neighborhood of actual or potential residence - on migration between neighborhoods with varying socioeconomic and demographic qualities. Residential mobility research has typically focused on individual- and family-level determinants of migration, occasionally taking into consideration reactions to the socio-demographic characteristics of the immediate neighborhood of residence. Due largely to data limitations and methodological complexity, the broader social and demographic context of surrounding neighborhoods, and the residential opportunity structures defined by housing markets in these areas, have received almost no attention in this research. This project applies for the first time spatial regression strategies to individual- and family-level data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics merged with data from the 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000 censuses to study how housing market conditions and socio-demographic characteristics of both immediate and surrounding areas influence individuals' and families' decision to move out of the current neighborhood and how these extra-local conditions affect the choice of a destination neighborhood. Through the unique application of this modeling strategy, this project promises to facilitate a fuller understanding of the contextual conditions that promote or impede inter-neighborhood migration and, most importantly, of the migration processes that shape broader patterns of residential racial and ethnic segregation and racial differences in exposure to poor and distressed neighborhood contexts. In order to inform the development of more effective specification strategies for the future study of inter-neighborhood migration, the research will focus on the geographic scale of extra-local mobility influences, demographic (including racial and ethnic) and socioeconomic variations in this geographic scale of influence, the functional form of extra-local effects, and the ways in which the characteristics of extra-local neighborhoods moderate the effects of more traditional contextual- and micro-level predictors of migration.