Majority Movers
57% of households living in the survey neighborhoods moved out of their original housing units.
Family mobility in low-income neighborhoods poses significant challenges to community change initiatives. This report seeks to quantify those challenges by (1) focusing on how residential mobility changed neighborhood composition and characteristics over time in the Making Connections sites; (2) exploring characteristics and circumstances of “movers, newcomers and stayers”, and (3) offering a set of neighborhood mobility models and their implications for family well-being and the community change field.
About a third of movers across the Making Connections neighborhoods were “up-and-out” movers, heading toward better neighborhoods where they said they were more satisfied and optimistic. Among stayers, close to half were attached to their neighborhoods and positive about their future. A much smaller share of stayers said they were remaining in place because they lacked viable alternatives.