Tenant Immobility and Family Well-Being: Considering the Role of Networks, Neighborhoods, and the Indoor Environment

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research.

NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields.

Under the sponsorship of Dr. Ann Owens at the University of Southern California, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating the relation between tenant immobility and gentrification. Rising rental costs combined with stagnating wages have led to an affordable housing crisis in the United States.

Sociologists measuring the impact of housing unaffordability on U.S. families tend to focus on how rising housing costs displace renters from neighborhoods, and where renters move after they have been displaced. However, this focus overlooks how housing unaffordability may negatively impact low-income renters even before they experience displacement.

Because moves are expensive and uncertain, it is likely that families make significant trade-offs to remain in their current home. Using in-depth interviews and survey data, this project will examine the experiences of immobile families living in Los Angeles County, California—one of the nation’s least affordable rental markets. It will identify the strategies that renters use to remain in their home and how these strategies shape their material, physical, and emotional well-being.

More specifically, it will test the prediction that tenants manage poor maintenance at home to remain in neighborhoods that they value, and that strict tenant screening practices discourage moves away from low-quality rentals. This project will focus on the experiences of low-income minority households, who are understudied in sociological research on residential decision-making.

The findings from this study can direct policy interventions that better protect tenants from apartment disinvestment and make rental housing more accessible at the tenant screening stage of housing searches.

Sociologists have studied the relationship between gentrification and displacement (e.g., involuntary moves) for nearly four decades. However, less research has examined the experiences of disadvantaged renters in gentrifying neighborhoods who are immobile. By overlooking low-income families who do not move, existing sociological research on gentrification underestimates the impact of rising housing costs on family well-being.

To address this gap, this project will answer the following research questions: (1) How do social networks, neighborhood contexts, and building-level conditions influence renter immobility? And (2), what are the potentially countervailing pathways through which immobility shapes renters’ material, emotional, and physical well-being? Based in Los Angeles County, CA, this project will use interviews and survey data from 80 low-income, immigrant renters—a population that has received scant scholarly attention in the residential mobility literature.

I will supplement interviews with two surveys—the Berkman Syme Social Network Index to assess social integration and a housing adequacy measure from the U.S. Census that captures indoor environmental quality. I hypothesize that immobile renters manage substandard living environments to remain near neighborhood resources, job opportunities, and supportive social networks.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.