When are they insecure? Housing arrangements and residential mobility among families with children

Abstract

A growing proportion of children live in unaffordable, overcrowded, or doubled-up housing, raising concerns among scholars of child wellbeing. These arrangements may affect children through increased exposure to insecure mobility such as frequent or reactive moves. Though scholars consider resource-strained arrangements insecure, the assumption that they lead to insecure mobility is quantitatively untested. Further, demographic theory suggests that these arrangements would lead to purposive moves, which are calculated adjustments to things like costs, space, or independence that have plausibly neutral or beneficial effects for children. I use individual-fixed effects regressions and restricted-access residential histories from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to assess how living in resource-strained housing predicts exposure to mobility outcomes for children. Consistent with literature on housing insecurity, severe cost burdens and doubling up with non-kin predict higher probabilities of either frequent or reactive moves, and severe overcrowding precedes moves to high-poverty neighborhoods. Aligned with a traditional view on mobility, analyses also suggest that cost burdens, overcrowding, and doubling up lead to purposive moves to less expensive housing, more spacious housing, and more independent housing arrangements, respectively. Together, these findings suggest that housing strains, in the absence of poverty, increase the likelihood of a set of moves that have generally ambivalent implications for children’s life chances. However, families in poverty may lack the resources necessary to make moves that address their housing needs and aspirations. These findings contradict long-held rules of thumb, suggesting a reconsideration of how we collectively define, study, and respond to insecurity.