Like counting deckchairs on the Titanic: A study of institutional racism and housing allocations in Haringey and Lambeth

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Abstract
Why and how do black people lose out in the provision of social housing? This was the question that we set out to examine, looking at the situation in two London boroughs with a declared commitment to anti‐racism in the late 1980s. Previous studies had focused on the role of officer discretion, and a popular strategy of ‘institutional hygiene’ had been adopted to counter this factor by many agencies as part of an anti‐racist or more general equal opportunities policy. This strategy concentrated on limiting individual officer discretion near the point of service delivery in favour of formalising procedures and monitoring outcomes. In this paper we re‐examine the role of officer discretion and look at the way that differing local institutional discourses of racial and ethnic difference, particularly essentialist ones, affect the way that housing outcomes are produced and either made visible or hidden. We argue first that it is important to examine the local context to see how racial meanings are constructed and reproduced by individual and institutions in a dynamic relationship. Second, we argue that using a gaming metaphor is helpful in examining the way that different interests and players interact at different levels in the process of housing allocation, and that this contributes to a better understanding of how racialised groups can be disadvantaged by a number of factors in the allocation of social housing.

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