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The residential environment is a particularly important setting for human behavior by virtue of its significance for roles, relationships, and the sense of place in the world. Based on interviews with 2,622 respondents from 42 municipalities in 10 SMSAs across the country, this study tried to clarify some of the dimensions of residential experience that affect residential and community satisfaction. The frequent finding of a strong relationship between social class or majority/minority status and residential satisfaction is examined under controlled conditions. This relationship appears to be mainly a function of the large inequities in housing and neighborhood associated with social inequalities. It is these variations in residential quality that are the direct, primary influences on residential satisfaction. Closer analyses of the specific sources of residential and community satisfaction reveal the prominence of objective features of the residential environment in accounting for such satisfaction. Local social interaction plays a relatively minor part in explaining residential attachment; and its effects are limited to that modest proportion of the population for whom such neighborhood and community relationships are highly valued.

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The gradual deterioration of older urban dwellings and the belief that such areas provide a locus for considerable social pathology have stimulated concern with altering the physical habitat of the slum. Yet the technical difficulties, the practical inadequacies, and the moral problems of such planned revisions of the human environment are also forcing themselves upon our attention most strikingly (see Gans, 1959). While a full evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of urban renewal must await studies which derive from various disciplines, there is little likelihood that the vast sums currently available will be withheld until there is a more systematic basis for rational decisions. Thus it is of the utmost importance that we discuss all aspects of the issue as thoroughly as possible and make available even the more fragmentary findings which begin to clarify the many unsolved problems.Since the most common foci of urban renewal are areas which have been designated as slums, it is particularly important to obtain a clearer picture of so-called slum areas and their populations. Slum areas undoubtedly show much variation, both variation from one slum to another and heterogeneity within urban slum areas. However, certain consistencies from one slum area to another have begun to show up in the growing body of literature. It is quite notable that the available systematic studies of slum areas indicate a Marc Fried received his PhD in clinical psychology from Harvard University in 1955. His current positions include those of Research Professor