Out-mobility from Stockholm’s immigrant-dense neighbourhoods–a study of two cohorts

Abstract

The central themes of this study are how housing tenure affects moving away from neighbourhoods with differing degrees of immigrant concentration in Stockholm and, comparing two cohorts, how the relationship between housing tenure, ethnic background and residential mobility develops over time. The findings reveal that the effect of housing tenure on moving varies marginally between neighbourhood types, and differences between housing tenures are reduced over time. Residential mobility is increasingly associated with higher income levels and members of the non-western, foreign-born group are less likely to move when the housing market is increasingly owner dominated. These ethnic hierarchies also apply to residential sorting. The sorting of out-movers from neighbourhoods with high concentrations of immigrants is increasingly affected by income. However, the non-western, foreign-born group is also increasingly dependent on housing assets in order to leave immigrant-dense neighbourhoods, which is not the case for other groups. The results show a shift in the necessary resources for residential mobility trajectories for those at the bottom end of the ethnic hierarchy and indicate that the place-stratification framework needs to differentiate between different types of assets and population groups to enable a better understanding of residential sorting in a changing housing market.