Assessing the Intersection of Neighborhood Change and Residential Mobility Pathways for the Chicago Metropolitan Area (2006–2015)

Residential mobility processes remain largely a black box for housing policy researchers. Whereas neighborhood sociodemographic indicators provide insight into the types of push and pull factors that are associated with residential mobility, connecting the behavior of individual households to patterns of neighborhood change remains a challenge. At the same time, displacement and replacement are core tenets of theorized neighborhood change processes. Using household-level longitudinal data on residential location choice for Cook County, Illinois, this article connects residential mobility flows to origin and destination neighborhood change trajectories. This approach highlights the ways in which income plays an important role in mediating flows between neighborhood change types, as well as the neighborhood change dynamics experienced by nonmovers. Findings from this work are particularly important for engaging with longstanding housing policy concerns—namely, how to balance organic processes of neighborhood change with the need for stability.