ONE / Introduction

This chapter provides overarching frameworks for understanding the determinants of individual household residential mobility, housing tenure choice, and residential property investment decisions, synthesizing the existing scholarship on these behaviors. These frameworks show how households and housing investors are behaviorally linked, how their actions get aggregated to produce neighborhood-level outcomes, and how these aggregate outcomes, in turn, reflect back on the individual decision makers and their families, shaping their perceptions, behaviors, qualities of life and future opportunities. These frameworks are distinguished by their consideration of different spatial scales—individual, neighborhood, local political jurisdiction and metropolitan area—and how the forces affecting neighborhoods are woven together in a complex web of mutually causal, self-reinforcing relationships. The chapter introduces eight core propositions related to how we make our neighborhoods and how they make us.