Housing aspirations and migration in later life: developments during the 1980s

"This paper tests hypotheses concerning the differentiation of early and late old age in the United Kingdom with reference to housing preferences and requirements and their translation into migration. Evidence is drawn from the 1991...census and from a representative sample of elderly people in SE England. The sources demonstrate the continued elaboration of long-distance, metropolitan-decentralizing migrations around the age of retirement. Also shown are relatively high rates of residential mobility among people in their seventies and eighties. Most of their migrations are short distance, but nonetheless with a net redistributional effect that sustains urban decentralization at the oldest ages. There is no evidence of significant return migration to London at advanced ages. From the survey responses, distinctive housing dissatisfactions are identified in early and late retirement, but neither set exactly matches expressed motivations for moves."