Residential Location

The Impact of Residential Location

Residential location can influence people's economic opportunities and social relationships. At a large geographic scale, living in different regions provides distinct combinations of opportunities that exist only in that place. Regions vary in the cost of living and housing and also in the available natural amenities. Additionally, urban and rural places are different in the job opportunities they contain, the social relationships among people who live in them, and levels of political representation available. Urban regions contain concentrations of employment and business activities, sometimes with specialized clusters of industries arising that employ people with particular skills, whereas rural places are often at the fringes of such activity. Typically, residents of urban areas are less involved with their neighbors than are residents of more rural small towns, turning to neighbors only if they find them compatible in some way. To the extent that national political representation depends on density, rural areas can be underrepresented. At the same time, people in rural places can be much more involved in local governance.

Living in an urban region does not guarantee access to economic opportunities. In 1968, John Kain's work highlighted the potential impacts of residential location on access to work in urban regions. He suggested that a mismatch existed between the location of jobs and the residential location of African Americans, spawning decades of research on the topic. The spatial mismatch is only one mechanism potentially responsible for such neighborhood effects: a lack of exposure to the middle class, contagion effects spurring the spread of delinquent behaviors from person to person, and the formation of alternative subcultures that support behaviors that differ from the mainstream. A broad literature investigates a wide array of neighborhood effects on the lives of the poor, placing residential location—both in terms of a neighborhood's connections to surrounding urban regions and with regard to local neighborhood economic opportunities—as centrally important, especially for children.

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