Contextualizing Residential Mobility and Housing Choice: Evidence from Urban China

The study of residential mobility and housing decisions, in which individuals and households are the focus of analysis, is a major strand of Western urban studies. Arguably, residential mobility and housing decisions underlie much of urban growth and change, and housing consumption is of paramount importance to an individual's well-being, and the process of residential location and relocation is central to understanding urban dynamics and changing social and spatial stratification in cities. Suburbanization of middle-class households and gentrification of selected inner-city neighbourhoods are obvious examples of how residential mobility structures the urban space. Residential mobility generally gauges neighbourhood transience, and creates and maintains the sociodemographic profile of a neighbourhood. The literature on residential mobility and housing choice is voluminous. Early works were conducted largely by geographers and sociologists. For quite some time residential mobility has been conceptualized as a spatial adjustment process, through which a household adjusts housing consumptionölocation, size, type, and tenure formöto changing circumstances, both internal and external to the household (Rossi, 1955; Wolpert, 1966; Brown and Moore, 1970; Michelson, 1977), and advances along its housing career (Kendig, 1990). The latter is largely defined by the household's housing aspirations, stage in the family life cycle, and means at its disposal. Put differently, residential mobility aims at restoring a state of consumption equilibrium (Quigley and Weinberg, 1977), which may be dynamically defined. In this sense, residential mobility is essential to the attainment of a Pareto optimum. Barriers to residential mobility are thus also barriers to achieving economic efficiency (Kingsley and Turner, 1993). Residential mobility has also been employed to achieve certain social objectives. A move generates a chain of vacancies. To many, the passing of a dwelling from one household to another is an effective means of providing housing to lower income groups (Lansing et al, 1969). Quigley and Weinberg (1977) have anchored the study of residential mobility and housing choice in the neoclassical economics tradition. Advancements in choice models of the McFadden (1974) type have produced sophisticated econometric works on housing decisions and residential moves. Examples include Quigley (1976), Hanushek and Quigley (1978), and Henderson and Ioannides (1989). The great majority of the above-cited studies are framed in the spatial adjustment model tradition. But more recently there has been increasing attention paid to the market conditions and supply constraints under which housing decisions are made. For example, it is well documented that the propensity to move declines sharply with attainment of homeownership. Yet the latter depends, among other things, on access to home finance, and hence on the way the financial market is organized. Mobility rates show pronounced spatial and cyclical variations. In particular, mobility rates correlate positively with employment and housing growth (Moore and Rosenberg, 1993, page 129). In the United States, mobility rates in fast-growing cities in the southwest are three times those of old industrial cities such as Detroit and Philadelphia (Moore and Clark, 1986). The way the housing provision system is organized obviously impinges on residential mobility and on housing choice. It is well documented that mobility rates in European countries where the state has played a much larger role in housing provision are much lower than those in the United States. Recently, notably in the Netherlands and Britain, however, Guest editorial Environment and Planning A 2004, volume 36, pages 1 ^ 6