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Race, Class and the Allocation of Public Housing in Britain

Centre of Urban Studies and Urban Planning University of Hong Kong

Valerie Karn

Centre for Urban and Regional Studies at the University of Birmingham

This article uses data from surveys of public housing applicants and tenants and from an ethnographic study of the procedures of a major British housing authority to explain the reasons for racially discriminatory housing allocations. It shows how central judgments of 'respectability' are to the allocation processes of housing departments, even when, officially, allocations are based on a system of 'housing need'. We trace how class and racial factors in the wider society become invested with official or semi-official status as they are absorbed into the housing authority's rationing processes, both of a formal and a more informal nature. We advance an explanation for discriminatory allocations which emphasises on the one hand, the integration of public housing bureaucracies into an inegalitarian social totality and, on the other, the conceptual connexion between racial, class and other forms of social discrimination.

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