Divisive social policy: the competition for physical and symbolic resources

Abstract

In this chapter, the focus turns to explore how the policy impacted on participants’ perceptions of fairness and justice in social housing allocation. This is set within the context of existing debates about the racialisation of social housing, a result of struggles over who should have preference to access this declining resource. While those tensions are played out at the local level, the rhetoric around social housing has increasingly linked this form of tenure with ‘welfare dependency’. The chapter begins by exploring how participants evaluate austerity politics in terms of their own economic position. It then turns to focus on their status and social positioning and how the policy raises questions of worth and value. What we see here are not just struggles over material resources such as housing, but also over less tangible psychosocial and symbolic resources that afford people a sense of worth and value.