Policymakers may be thinking about economically disadvantaged neighborhoods too narrowly, a new study indicates.

Using the same data analyzed in earlier studies, Amy Spring, an associate professor in the sociology department at Georgia State University, and her team, were able to complicate the long-standing assumption that people are “stuck” in their neighborhoods to explain why they don’t leave.

Being “stuck” implies that people in these areas have no option but to stay, due to how difficult it is to leave for economic and structural reasons. This narrative has influenced many policies in the United States aimed at alleviating poverty, the most well-known of these initiatives being housing vouchers. This idea was popularized by the book Stuck in Place (University of Chicago Press, 2013) by Patrick Sharkey.

However, Spring’s team found these initiatives may not be completely effective. Oftentimes, families and individuals who do leave the area end up moving back for other reasons.

“In the Moving to Opportunity experiment, families were given vouchers to move to a different neighborhood,” Spring says. “It was an experiment to see what would happen over time if people were given a ticket out. They found that a lot of those families ended up moving back, but they don’t have comprehensive data as to why.”

Another phenomenon, called rootedness, could help explain why. As opposed to stuckness, which implies that these families and individuals do not have the money to move, rootedness describes all the social and emotional reasons someone wouldn’t leave an impoverished area.

These include family, friends, familiar places, etc. Rootedness is also a side effect of weak ties to societal institutions, which forces people to develop strong relationships with family members and neighbors out of necessity.

Based on their analysis of this data, Spring’s team found that most families surveyed were both stuck and rooted in their neighborhoods.

“We found that immobility is most strongly associated with the household head lacking a high school education, which is something that is pretty well-known… The new variable is the number of social ties in the neighborhood,” Spring says. “They’re both important.”

Read the full article about economic disadvantages by Amanda Head at Futurity.