Identification of Significant Household Attributes for Different Typology of Residential Moves: A Reason and Urgency Perspective

Residential mobility of a household is an important driver for change in urban form, accessibility, and travel demand. The reasons to move, urgency, and household characteristics trigger a household to change its location and influence the subsequent decisions in residential relocation process such as tenure choice, search time, and in some cases where to search. Given the residential mobility studies done in Indian context, there is still a lack of work exploring the characteristics of movers and for what reasons they move. The present chapter aims to explore this gap. A retrospective survey is carried out in Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation and Newtown (India), and a data sample of 459 households is collected. Initially, a typology of moves is developed based on the urgency in move and the type of reasons. Thereafter, a multinomial logit model is developed to identify the significant household characteristics (socio-economic, socio-demographic, commute behavior, dwelling, and attitude) for each developed typology. The result indicates the significance of household head (HHH) age, household size, monthly income, HHH employment type, housing tenure, mode of travel, car ownership, and attitudinal variable (locational sensitive) on the typology of move. The present study is the part of major research which aims to explore the overall residential relocation process through decision-trajectory approach where the type of move initiates the decision trajectory.