Residential preferences for areas of population growth or decline: An analysis of the characteristics, motivations and housing prefer-ences of migrants

Abstract

In this Master’s Thesis, a research design is created to answer the question: What differences in characteristics, motivations and housing preferences of migrants can be recognised between movers to areas of population growth and movers to areas of population decline? Answering this question is meant to substantiate policy makers in the question what type and quantity of housing needs to be realised according to different types of demographic developments in areas. In answering this question, a number of different variables have been discussed in a theoretic section, to then continue to use those variables in the analysis. For the analysis, data from the Netherlands’ Housing Survey (WoON, 2018) is used. With this data, both bivariate and multinomial logistic regression analyses have been performed. This has yielded in a great amount of output, from which could be derived that the mentioned differences between movers to the demographically different areas exist. Significant differences were found for characteristics, motivations and preferences, creating the overall view that movers to areas of growth generally have a higher income and are higher educated, but movers to areas of decline generally bought a house with more rooms and more often a garden.