Measuring Integration in Affordable Housing with Location Data

Moving people to 'better' places underpins the rationale for over 42 billion dollars in federal spending on flagship programs in affordable housing and social policy. Yet remarkably little is known about how much and where integration actually occurs. This project deploys a national, large-scale, and mobility-based test of the major theories of how integration happens using cell phone location data. Case studies of metropolitan areas identify additional characteristics of places that correspond with more integration. Findings provide new evidence on the effects of housing policies, such as the social outcomes of vouchers and zoning incentives for mobility, as well as context-specific mechanisms and enabling conditions that may yield insights and inform place-based policies. The publicly available data products from this research enable scientific inquiries on mobilities across multiple spatial and temporal scales and set the stage for a wider range of work on related issues and their equity impacts. This project makes a novel intellectual contribution to questions of 'people versus place' and the study of human mobility data in the geospatial and social sciences. The research tests the tension between theories on the power of proximity and opportunity for individual outcomes, which drive most affordable housing policies in the US, and those of case studies that show persistent patterns of experienced segregation and exclusion inside mixed-income areas. Geospatial, statistical, and qualitative methods examine segregation and access to opportunity to incorporate a wider range of experienced contexts through human mobility data in a granular and spatiotemporally contingent manner. Findings nuance localized heterogeneity and persistent 'microsegregation' dynamics of high relevance to social and housing policy and contribute new knowledge to current prominent debates on the role of socioeconomic and racial integration in promoting opportunity in affordable housing. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.