Community Style Living

Over my past three years at Tech I have come to notice some unfair stereotypes placed on the community style housing that tie in with the social class system. A majority of people, students and parents alike, believe the community style housing is just flat out gross. I too was one of those people until I started to work in one of the “old school dorms”. Like a majority of the students and parents, I used to think community housing was filthy, inside and out. They are all old, nasty buildings, where the space is very confined and you have to share personal space including the restrooms and showers. Of course because the bathrooms are shared with other students there is no telling what kind of filthy diseases are growing in these places. These stereotypes were also associated with lower class people who live in these buildings. These beliefs were not only reinforced by people I talked to but by social medias and society as well. These negative stereotypes not only ruin the reputation of community style living but it also carries on the unjust treatment of the lower class people that live there. Unbeknownst to most, community style housing is actually super clean. Each building has it’s own cleaning crew that cleans the facility daily. There also is so much more to community style housing than most give it credit for. The community style buildings have a very strong sense of community and unity, and in tern there seem to be more personal, life long relationships produced in these types of buildings than other types of housing. Community style buildings also seem to have more activities and student interaction the the lobby or common areas of the buildings. These positive qualities of community style housing make it very “homey” and really makes the experience of staying there enjoyable. This too is true of lower class people. As we saw in the video presented in class, People Like Us, many times there is so much more to a person than we give them credit for. We as a society get so caught up in the outside appearance, social classification, and what we have been told that we don’t treat one another as an equal and actually find out what is true for ourselves.