ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the semantic and pragmatic meanings of housing in American society. It shows that symbolic attitudes toward the house are very different for slum dwellers, members of the traditional working class, and families in the modern working class who are on their way upward into the middle class. The aim of the slum dwellers is to find a house or apartment that will provide safe shelter, adequate room for sleeping, relaxing, and eating, and a haven from noise, odors, dirt, and interpersonal violence and abuse. Slum dwellers are emphatic in their concern that the house serve as a haven because they inhabit a world in which homicide, burglary, and social pathology are commonplace. The threatening world of the lower class comes to be absorbed into a world view which generalizes the belief that the environment is threatening more than it is rewarding—that rewards reflect the infrequent working of good luck and that danger is endemic.
