What about your friends?: Social networks in a mixed income housing development

• Main Author: Allen, Tennille Nicole
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2009
• Subjects: African American Studies; Black studies; Ethnic studies; Housing developments; Income; Individual & family studies; Social networks
• ISBN: 1109526997; 9781109526998

This research employs qualitative methods to analyze the social networks and social capital—defined here as sociability, social support, social leverage, and voluntary participation—of women living in Lake Parc Place, a mixed-income public housing community in Chicago. I include an examination of sociability as many studies of social networks, capital, and isolation in poor urban communities fail to provide a complete picture of the social relationships present in such environs. As such, sociability, the desire to associate with others for the sake of enjoying another's company (Simmel 1949), is undertheorized in the urban sociology literature upon which this research draws. I argue that more needs to be known about both these relationships and the understandings and processes that underlie them. My research looks at the meanings, understandings, and rules of social interactions in Lake Parc Place as they inform the finding that though social capital is present, it is tempered by the women's constant refrain that they are loners or have no friends. Women in Lake Parc Place have access to social networks and capital, yet there is a disinclination for many of them to speak of the value of these resources or to identify intimacy in their relationships, as evidenced by the reluctance to recognize them as friendships. I argue that this is steeped in a lack of trust and sense of suspicion and leads to a disconnect between the presence of social networks and the activation of social capital. I explain this discrepancy by examining the content and context of the extreme distrust that pervades the lives of Lake Parc Place's residents. This distrust emanates from both interpersonal and institutional sources. In addition to negative interactions within social networks, the larger context in which Lake Parc Place is embedded contributes to the pervasive distrust found there and negatively impacts the formation of intimate interpersonal relationships between residents. While part of this is located in class-based tensions between low and moderate-income residents, a larger component is found in the societal, institutional, and ecological contexts of the development and the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in which it is located.