What the Housing Consumer Wants

The high mobility of American families provides evidence of shifting preferences during the family life cycle. Although 20 per cent of all Americans move every year, two-thirds of the moves are within a metropolitan area, and therefore are to serve a changed preference for space, location, dwelling type or design, or some related desire. Millions of single persons comprise a large group whose requirements are neglected in the market. The potential market opportunities are poorly understood and have evoked little producer response. A wider range of choice for housing consumers is clearly one prerequisite to greater consumer satisfaction.

One of the hopes for persuading the American consumer to value housing more highly and thus to create a higher level of effective demand for new and rehabilitated building is to offer him a product that he wants.

But what does the consumer want? Unfortunately, no one knows, at least with sufficient assurance to cause the building industry to make many drastic changes in its present practices. The purchase or rental of any dwelling represents a series of compromises by the consumer. He does not like every feature in the house he selects, nor does he dislike every feature in the house he rejects. He makes his decision by striking the best balance he can, within his means, between what he likes and what he dislikes. And, by and large, producers use this market test as an index of consumer wants. Houses and apartments which show the best current rate of sale or rent are produced in still greater number. But observed behavior can be a misleading guide to preferred behavior.

What Attitude Surveys Show

Government agencies, housing magazines, and research institutions have attempted over the years to find out what kind of housing different groups of consumers would like to have. Their efforts have not been very successful, partly because few of the surveys meet accepted standards of statistical sampling. In most cases, respondents are accepted on a catch-as-catch-can basis: subscribers to a given magazine or persons in attendance at a conference of potential home buyers. Another important limitation is that elicited responses do not always have a cost dimension: the stated ideal often represents a combination of preferred tenure, location, and housing type without regard to the costs involved. Moreover, no matter how skillfully a question is framed, the answer is bound to be limited by the individual respondent's level of comprehension and articulateness. Some part of the producer's failure to provide shelter in amounts, sizes, designs, and locations that the consumer prefers is this inability of the consumer to see himself clearly. Caught as he usually is between necessity and preference, the consumer tends to make his housing decisions on the basis of arbitrary judgments. But despite all the difficulties inherent in attitude surveys, they are an important aid to an understanding of the consumer of housing.

The degree of preference for homeownership varies markedly among income groups. In the upper-income group it runs to about 80 per cent, in the middle-income group to 75 per cent, in the low-income group to 66 per cent. Among the groups which achieve their preference for homeownership, the most numerous by far are the self-employed and managerial groups. Closely following them are the professional and semiprofessional groups.

If satisfaction with tenure is to be achieved, attempts must be made to increase the rate at which consumers who wish to can shift more easily from rented dwellings to owned ones, and to widen the opportunity for rental housing for those families which prefer to rent. In other countries intermediate forms of tenure have been devised, like the lease for the life of the tenant, which provide some of the advantages of owning along with those of renting. Cooperative ownership, prevalent in Europe, and growing in the United States, offers some of the advantages of renting along with those of owning.

Every survey indicates that almost all families prefer a singlefamily, detached house. Yet many millions of American families live in attached houses, two- or four-family houses, or apartments. In some metropolitan areas, the proportion is half or more. Evidently millions of individuals and families, when confronted with either the economics or the locational advantages of other dwelling types, abandon their preference for the singlefamily, detached house. Row houses, still popular in Eastern cities, provide much of the privacy of single family houses, some private outdoor space, and locations convenient to work and shops. Apartments, too, permit locations near centers of urban activities and in addition freedom from maintenance responsibility, both tremendous advantages to many families.

No one can forecast whether the expressed preference for the single-family house will be reflected more decisively in family behavior. If it is, cities may spread out over areas perhaps five to ten times their present size. Doubtless they will continue to have high density centers but their historical character as urban places will be wholly different. Cities may well become endless expanses of low-density suburbia.

The principal criteria for satisfaction with a dwelling unit are the amount and distribution of space, physical condition, and equipment. As long as condition and equipment are well below the standards of the household, concern about space remains relatively dormant. Thus the family that lacks a bathtub usually exhibits little concern over a separate bedroom for each child. Space is a sophisticated preference, a largely self-generating luxury that accompanies a higher standard of living. In that sense, it is a concern primarily of the middle- and upper-income family.

Preferences for tenure, type, and location of dwelling are often interrelated. For example, the desire for ownership usually implies a single-family dwelling, and a single-family dwelling usually means a suburban location. Since the end of World War II, with little central-city land available for development, preference for the owned, single-family house has almost automatically meant preference for the suburbs.

There is considerable debate as to whether suburban location is a specific and valid preference or merely a by-product of other preferences. Some persons believe improvements in transportation and communication merely made it possible for people to do what they had always wanted: to live in an environment with green space and air and sunshine, but to keep their chances of making a living in the great metropolitan labor market.

Others are less convinced of the validity of this position and see in the modern suburban movement a pincers action: people who want to escape some aspects of their present location and housing can find what they consider to be more desirable conditions only if they sacrifice locational convenience, time, and effort.

Undoubtedly one of the strong motivations for a family's move to the suburbs is the belief that suburban living is beneficial for children. But there are other reasons too. One is the negatively expressed desire to get away from the city, with its noise, traffic, and faster pace. Another is the desire to be near friends, relatives, or the "right sort of people." And, finally, the reason is sometimes advanced that suburban living is less expensive than city living. Obviously, the importance of this latter motive depends in part on the individual family's income and in part on costs in a particular area. It is seldom cited by middle- and upperincome families living in the built-up suburbs of the large Eastern metropolitan centers; it is most frequently cited by lower middleincome groups living in semirural fringe areas of moderatesized urban communities.

One of the most important deductions that can be made from the evidence on city versus suburban location is that if centralcity renewal programs are to be successful in either holding the middle-income family in the city or attracting it back from the suburbs, more drastic changes must be planned in the types, densities, and forms of tenure of central-city housing than have been anticipated. And, considering the importance of neighborhood and schools to suburban parents, the scale of change will have to be larger than is usually assumed by proponents of rehabilitation.

Source: Housing, People and Cities