Project Description
Across the United States, news stories have profiled sales of rental housing causing the displacement of families, many of whom are poor, Black, or Hispanic. For families with children, this displacement can portend disruptions to child development, school stability, and academic achievement. While a robust literature demonstrates negative associations between housing mobility and a range of negative school outcomes, no study has examined how rental housing sales might cause residential mobility, school switches, or poor school performance. This project will fill that gap by creating an innovative and novel data linkage between real estate sales data and public-school student records covering all residential building sales and student records throughout the state of North Carolina from 2010 to 2019. This research will provide new, compelling evidence of the causes of school mobility and its consequences for racial-ethnic inequality in school achievement.
Project Goals
This study aims to answer the following questions:
- Do poor, Black, or Hispanic children experience higher rates of displacement due to building sales compared to wealthier or White children?
- Is displacement associated with lower rates of stability and success in school, and is this association stronger for Black and Hispanic children compared to White children?
- How do the distance of moves or the socioeconomic composition of new neighborhoods mediate the association between displacement and educational outcomes? Is this mediation stronger for Black and Hispanic children compared to White children?
- Are displaced children more likely to be identified as homeless by schools under the McKinney-Vento Act, and how does homeless identification mediate educational outcomes?