Housing

Human Needs Served by Housing

The physiological need for shelter from the elements is a primary requirement that housing fulfills. An adequate housing unit provides this basic shelter, along with adequate light, ventilation, and sanitary waste disposal. The structure itself is also designed so that it does not pose additional threats to physical well-being, such as dangerous electrical or heating service or inadequate emergency egress in case of fire. In industrialized societies, standards as to what constitutes adequate physical comfort, space, sanitation, and safety have risen steadily since the beginning of the twentieth century.

However, in addition to physiological needs, housing also addresses all of the other needs included in psychologist Abraham Maslow's well-known hierarchy of needs: safety, belonging, self-esteem, and selfactualization. Because housing structures human interactions spatially, where people live plays an important role in determining with whom people interact and the quality of those interactions. Thus, housing plays a major role in determining the shape and quality of the human community.

Adequate housing meets safety needs by providing security for material possessions and by enabling people to control when and with whom they interact. The importance of this control is illustrated by the negative example of the large, high-rise public housing complexes built after World War II in the United States. These developments were not designed so that families could be secure in their private dwelling spaces, and effective surveillance and control of public spaces could not be carried out. This lack of control, as well as the high concentration of poor households in a limited area, contributed to the social disintegration of these projects and left many residents in a constant state of fear. Unless basic safety needs are met, all other individual and communal activities are undermined.

The individual's need for belonging, or love, is met primarily through family and friends and secondarily through interaction with the surrounding community. An adequate dwelling unit provides the space and amenities that enable a family to live with dignity and to have the maximum opportunity for positive familial relationships. Standards of overcrowding have varied widely over time and between cultures, but a dwelling unit that is too small to meet cultural expectations of personal space and comfort can contribute to family tensions. In contrast, when an individual has positive associations with his or her dwelling, they become strongly linked to positive associations with family. In this way, as the saying goes, a house becomes a home, a place where one is loved, accepted and supported.

Adequate housing also meets the need for belonging by creating a larger community with which the individual may interact. For most children, the collection of housing units that constitutes their neighborhood becomes the first arena in which they move away from exclusive dependence on their parents and establish relationships with others. In contrast, adults vary in the [Page 614]degree to which they continue to rely on their neighbors for their primary social network. Those with higher incomes and education often become linked to local, national, and even global networks that extend far beyond the neighborhood, so that their neighbors are less important to them than to lower-income persons who lack these extended linkages. However, almost everyone is interdependent with physical neighbors to some degree, and positive or negative interactions with them can have a profound effect on the quality of life. Thus, a housing unit is rarely an isolated physical structure. Rather, the quality of life it provides is closely [Page 615]linked to the nature and occupancy of the physical structures that surround it.

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