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.
The 1980s have witnessed a significant restructuring of housing tenure and widespread government support for the ideology of home ownership in Britain. This article examines the implications of market trends for ethnic minorities and looks at the changing strategies of ethnic minority housing purchasers. A complex picture of gains and losses emerges as more ethnic minorities buy into better neighbourhoods and young, white households begin to move into established multi-racial areas. There are encouraging signs that some private housing institutions are now providing a wider service to ethnic minorities than in the 1970s, but the structure of opportunities open to black purchasers is still highly differentiated. There is also little evidence of a fundamental change in racial attitudes towards Britain's ethnic minorities competing within the private housing market of the 1990s.
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