Research on residential mobility has focused on moving rather than staying, and as a consequence, we have a much poorer understanding of why people stay in contrast to why people move. But in fact staying is the usual practice and moving is a relatively rare event. We draw on previous work on staying and the notions of place attachment, that is being invested in a place, owning a house and having connections in the neighbourhood, to investigate the underlying dimensions of the decision to stay. We utilise a retrospective survey data set from Granada (Spain) to model, first, the decision to stay in the house versus moving and, second, the decision to move but stay in the neighbourhood versus moving outside the neighbourhood. The logit models show that family in the neighbourhood, interaction with the neighbours – local connection (using the facilities of the neighbourhood) and a measure of satisfaction with the neighbourhood provide a contextual understanding of why people stay, and who is likely to stay. The models provide data on the different meanings and ways of staying. Neighbourhood variables are crucial to explain the moves inside the same area, well beyond the personal and household characteristics included in most residential mobility models. As we would expect in the Spanish context, family plays an important role in attachment. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.