Horizontal Immobility: How Narratives of Neighborhood Violence Shape Housing Decisions

While poor families experience high residential instability, they also stay put for extended periods of time before moving. When they do move, they are likely to move laterally to a similarly disadvantaged place. These two processes—staying in place and churning—amount to "horizontal immobility." Why do people get stuck in disadvantaged environments? Prevailing understandings focus on constraints to residential choice, but even under limitations, families make active residential decisions. Drawing on fieldwork with 50 renters in a low-income, high-crime Baltimore neighborhood, this article proposes that neighborhoods themselves shape narratives governing residential decision-making. In high-crime neighborhoods, renters stay put as long as they can craft a story that justifies remaining. But when the narrative is ruptured by violent events, residents are pushed to action, often a move. The logic behind these moves is motivated by a desire to restore a sense of safety. The concept of "narrative rupture" sheds light on when a family decides to move, representing a mechanism for how residential decisions are shaped by neighborhood forces to reproduce poverty. This concept also contributes to theories of how culture shapes action: we are most likely to act when the narratives supporting our current course of action break down.