| The Role of Social Networks in Making Housing Choices: The Experience of the Gautreaux Two Residential Mobility Program
Melody L. Boyd
This article reflects the views of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
This article explores the experiences of participants in the Gautreaux Two housing mobility program, which was implemented in 2002. The program gave low-income residents of Chicago public housing a special voucher providing them the opportunity to move to more advantaged neighborhoods, designated as neighborhoods in which at least 76.5 percent of households were nonpoor and 70 percent were non-African American. Four waves of indepth, qualitative interviews were conducted by Northwestern University’s
Institute for Policy Research (IPR) between 2002 and 2005 with a randomly chosen sample of 91 families. Within the 3-year study window, this qualitative analysis of the IPR data compares residents who made secondary moves with those who stayed at their Gautreaux placement addresses. In this article, I apply insight from feminist urbanism and a focus on social networks to a comparison of the reasons some residents moved while others stayed. Secondary movers were motivated by several social network factors, including feelings of social isolation in the placement neighborhood, distance from kin, and transportation difficulties. Conversely, strong social networks were crucial reasons why some families remained in their Gautreaux neighborhoods or moved on to other similarly advantaged neighborhoods. This analysis explores policy implications for the success of mobility programs, including the need for continued program assistance to build and maintain strong social networks beyond the initial placement.
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