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Taking Apart the American Dream: The Influence of Income and Family Composition on Residential Evaluations

Center for Metropolitan Planning and Research and Assistant Professor of Sociology, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218

Americans' overwhelming desires for single family homeownership have been so well documented that they have been termed the 'American Dream'. Government and financial incentives for homeownership are believed to allow the fulfillment of uniformly accepted housing norms which drive people to buy their own homes. This research takes apart that American Dream by examining the preferences of different income and family life cycle groups for housing and neighborhood characteristics associated with the housing bundle. Based on a sample of Syracuse metropolitan respondents, this research applies the factorial survey method to assess the variations in housing preferences by socio-economic status and family composition. Findings show that all groups of respondents were indifferent to housings' tenure. All respondents desired single family housing but the intensity of these preferences for single family homes over other types of housing varied among subgroups. Strong desires were expressed not to live among blacks nor lower income households, although respondents expressed no desires for either suburban locations or physically homogeneous neighborhoods. These findings suggest that surface desires for homeownership may proxy for desires to control local racial and socio-economic composition.

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