Residential Mobility and Neighbourhood Careers Available to Purchase

Residential mobility is the process by which households attempt to harmonize their housing needs with their housing consumption. However, since houses are geographically inseparable from their neighbourhoods, when households move they also change their locations and their neighbourhoods. This paper examines how households make relative selections when they move between improving their housing consumption and improving the quality of their neigh-bourhoods. We found that households gain in both housing quality and neighbourhood quality, and in many cases, maintain the same housing quality, but gain in neighbourhood quality.