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Articles

The contexts of residential preferences. An experimental examination of contextual influences in housing decisions

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Pages 1973-1997 | Received 19 Oct 2020, Accepted 29 Nov 2021, Published online: 15 Dec 2021
 

Abstract

Residential preferences are often treated as exogenous and fixed. Challenging this assumption, this article elaborates how residential preferences are shaped by experienced neighbourhood conditions. In doing so, we acknowledge the mutual dependence of the neighbourhood context, residential preferences, and segregation patterns. Applying multilevel generalized linear latent and mixed logit models to unique, geocoded data from a choice experiment, it is demonstrated how heterogenous evaluations of the social and ethnic composition of available housing alternatives’ residential surroundings systematically vary with bespoke but not administrative neighbourhoods. These heterogeneous evaluations are mostly independent of respondents’ own social and ethnic background. Controlling for unobserved neighbourhood selection, however, removes the association with bespoke neighbourhoods’ composition. Nevertheless, even after accounting for unobserved selection processes, the evaluation of the social and ethnic composition of housing alternatives in the choice experiment systematically varies across bespoke neighbourhoods, pointing to unobserved neighbourhood influences that shape people’s residential preferences.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Figure A1. Example choice set.

Figure A1. Example choice set.

Figure A2. Distribution of local Moran’s I test statistic.

Figure A2. Distribution of local Moran’s I test statistic.

Figure A3. Alternative operationalization of respondents’ migration background.

Figure A3. Alternative operationalization of respondents’ migration background.

Appendix

Table A1. Descriptive statistics.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Burgergemeinde Bern.

Notes on contributors

Christoph Zangger

Christoph Zangger is a postdoctoral researcher in sociology. Among other things, his researches evolves around the empirical modeling of contextual and compositional effects in eduction and the labor market.

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