Speaker
Warren Lowell
Graduate Student, Sanford School of Public Policy
Duke University
Abstract
A large proportion of children in the United States live in unaffordable, overcrowded, or doubled-up housing, raising concerns for child wellbeing. While scholars generally consider these housing arrangements insecure, it’s theoretically unclear whether families in these situations move purposively to adjust housing consumption or insecurely in reaction to hardship. I use individual fixed-effects regression analyses with restricted-access residential histories from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to adjudicate between these two outcomes. Consistent with the insecurity perspective, severe cost burdens predict reactive moves (like evictions), doubling-up with non-kin predict frequent moves, and severe overcrowding predicts moves to high-poverty neighborhoods. However, cost burdens, overcrowding, and doubling up also reliably predict purposive moves to less expensive housing, more spacious housing, and more independent housing arrangements, but this finding is only true for families with incomes above poverty. These findings suggest that housing strains generally increase the likelihood of a set of moves that have ambivalent implications for children’s life chances, with poverty playing an important moderating role. The findings also contradict long held “rules of thumb” used by policymakers and housing scholars, suggesting a reconsideration of how we collectively define, study, and respond to insecurity.