The trapped and downwardly mobile: are the people who stay behind when a neighbourhood is invaded by nonresidential land users or lower-status immigrants, because they cannot afford to move or are otherwise bound to the present location. They are usually the downwardly mobile. Many of them are old people living on their pension.

Gans pointed out that only the last two groups suffer a transience and residential instability that bears the closest resemblance to the condition of Wirthian urbanism but the other groups do not suffer from mental instability or community decline.

On the basis of these findings Gans argued that socio-demographic factors such as class, life-cycle stages, ethnicity and culture are more important variables affecting the neighbourhood choices and the social life of urbanites than ecological variables such as size, density, and heterogeneity. These five types may all live in dense and heterogeneous surroundings, yet they have such diverse ways of life that it is hard to see how density and heterogeneity could exert a common influence.