ABSTRACT
This chapter is an exploration of three key interwoven issues found to shape the residential motivations of the interviewees: the role of family, the impact of housing and perceptions of safety. Household composition of South Asians has tended to be larger than the average in Britain. Extended family households or three generational living is common and has been maintained, to a large extent, as a traditional norm (Al Awad & Songuga-Barke 1992; Chang, Chen & Somerville 2003), indicating that the residential choices of South Asian groups might be more complex than those of their white counter-parts. As Chang et al. (2003: 733) write, ‘the decision to move involves changes in commuting times, neighbourhood amenities and social networks. These changes cannot be expected to have equal effects on the utility of each member of the household’. Indeed, the interplay of family hierarchies and more intricate generational roles is shown in the current research to have an impact on residential decision-making processes. The more complex household composition of South Asian households also has an influence on household housing needs and preferences. In general, the residential mobility literature lends itself to the assumption that households are bound to particular areas by ties to family members, jobs, neighbours and housing units (Speare 1974; Bach & Smith 1977; Newman & Duncan 1979; Landale & Guest 1985; Deane 1990). The strength of attachments may be measured as the degree of satisfaction expressed by members of the household, whilst it is argued that, in general, dissatisfaction rises as the family life cycle changes and the ‘fit’ of the house deteriorates. Due to the more complex household formations of the interviewees, there are often changes in different phases of the life cycle occurring at once within a household, meaning a greater variety of different housing needs may need to be addressed at any one time. Solutions to housing needs were not simply thought of as being structural, but, of course, related to key locational attributes. One such attribute is safety, a critical feature addressed in the housing literature specific to minority ethnic groups in contributing to housing outcomes (Bowes et al. 1997; Sarre et al. 1989). As the role of the neighbourhood (the people living there, the social ties that these create and the environment and services provided there) was discussed in the previous chapter, the safeness of a particular neighbourhood was also highlighted as an another decisive neighbourhood factor in choosing a place to live.
