As households move among housing units, the geographic patterns of metropolitan populations change. Over time, these changes have profound impacts on the location of residents and of the services and facilities that serve those residents. Equally important, those changes also alter the character and quality of the housing units themselves. Considerable attention has been focused by geographers and other scholars on residential mobility from the perspective of households, but relatively little research has highlighted the ways in which movements of households have affected housing units. This project will analyze mobility and related factors for ten American metropolises using longitudinal data from the American Housing Survey collected between 1974 and 1986. The research will focus on two major questions: (1) How do patterns of residential mobility within metropolises change as the overall level of mobility changes? and (2) What are the impacts of changing levels and patterns of mobility within metropolises on the geographic distributions of residential populations? Variables describing the mobility and demographic characteristics of households occupying housing units and of related variables reflecting the constitution of housing submarkets will be fit into a logit model in order to test a number of hypotheses related to the two central questions. The results of this research will be significant from both scholarly and practical standpoints. In terms of basic research, the project will provide a firmer basis for understanding the relationship between local mobility and the changing socioeconomic and demographic patterns of populations within metropolises, and it will clarify the relationship between households and housing units. These new understandings will also provide a firmer foundation for analyses of the evolving residential structure of specific cities, thereby enabling civic leaders to better assess the possible impacts of various policies.
