Abstract

The neoliberal system not only implies the establishment of a model based on the role the market plays in society at the expense of the state, but also a paradigm that impacts people’s livelihoods. Due to this, the social class structure currently includes a significant number of middle classes and a far smaller segment of workers’ groups. Regarding livelihoods, the neoliberal system conditions the ways of conceiving and reproducing consumption of various material and symbolic goods, including the residential area for living. What happens when you want to live in certain areas of the city but the economic capital available is not enough to fulfill that desire? In other words, what mechanisms to different social classes use to adapt their residential desires to their objective position in the social system (class position)? This chapter describes the expectations and mechanisms of residential adaptation of people from different social classes in Temuco and Padre Las Casas, one of Chile’s largest conurbations with the highest population growth in recent decades. For this, following the assumptions of grounded theory, 60 semi-structured interviews of people from different social classes in these cities were conducted and analyzed. The residential expectations analyzed express different needs according to social class. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.