Middle Class Housing Decisions and the Reproduction of Sociospatial Inequality in Santiago, Chile

• In Event: 056 - Regular Session. Consumers and Consumption

Abstract

Chile’s middle classes have grown and evolved in recent years, yet scholarship on middle class housing choices focuses primarily on gated communities. This paper, based on qualitative interviews with 68 families in two middle class communities in Santiago, takes a different approach. Following Bourdieu (2005), I examine middle class individuals’ distinct choices in the housing market based on the volume and composition of their capital (economic, social, cultural, and technical). Further, I contrast upper middle class residents’ pattern of “elective belonging” (Savage 2014; Silva and Wright 2009) --whereby they seek out communities with desirable amenities-- with lower middle class individuals’ constrained choices. I conclude that middle class individuals express ambivalence regarding their housing choices as they manage difficult contacts with rich and poor (Méndez 2008). Like studies of gated communities, I find that middle class families seek to avoid crime associated with the poor, but they adopt diverse strategies to do so, some of which contribute to reproducing large scale socioeconomic segregation.

Author

• Joel P. Stillerman, Grand Valley State University