The analysis of 17 years of field work with 1,200 low-income households in five different cities shows urgent crises force low-income families to choose the safest, most convenient locations necessary for immediate survival rather than take the time to find neighborhoods with great schools and job opportunities.

These recurrent, unpredictable shocks often include housing quality failure, housing policy changes, landlord behaviors, income changes, and neighborhood violence.

“By listening to how low-income families make their housing decisions, we can develop better policies to target what is really getting in their way of moving to higher opportunity neighborhoods with less racial and economic segregation,” says Stefanie A. DeLuca, professor of sociology and social policy at Johns Hopkins University.

“They’re not making that move because there is seldom enough time before the next emergency arises and forces them out and demands an immediate solution.”

The current pandemic will only exacerbate that pattern if evictions escalate amid record unemployment, say the authors of the new paper, which appears in City & Community.

NOT ‘PERSONAL PREFERENCE’
The findings demonstrate that lawmakers need to reconsider the extent to which federal, state, and local policies make assumptions about how low-income families decide where to live and where to send their children to school. Decision-makers often assume that personal preferences and structural impediments such as racial discrimination in housing markets are the primary impediments to reducing segregation by income and race.

Read the full article about forced moves and segregation by Johns Hopkins University via Futurity.