The Meaning of Housing in America

Housing activity—households using dwellings—forms a central feature in the human use of the earth. A house is a structure; a home is an experience. Housing is an interactive process with meanings tied to status, social position, wealth, power, aspirations, and personal identity. Housing decisions reflect social drives for congregation and segregation within U.S. cities, thus making social and cultural categories of urban society visible, intelligible, and stable. U.S. urban housing landscapes are destabilized by changing population age structure, wealth transfers among neighborhoods, foreign immigration, and interregional wealth shifts. Despite vigorous initiatives to break down neighborhood lass barriers, zoning laws and court decisions staunchly protect single-family housing areas, perhaps as an expression of a basic conservative instinct to protect and nurture human life. Valiant efforts to modify zoning laws to improve the position of weaker classes without threatening the stronger may produce a dilemma, but the American utopian tradition urges us to keep trying.