LIKE COUNTING DECKCHAIRS ON THE TITANIC - A STUDY OF INSTITUTIONAL RACISM AND HOUSING ALLOCATIONS IN HARINGEY AND LAMBETH

Why and how do black people lose out in the provision of social housin g? This was the question that we set out to examine, looking at the si tuation in two London boroughs with a declared commitment to anti-raci sm in the late 1980s. Previous studies had focused on the role of offi cer discretion, and a popular strategy of 'institutional hygiene' had been adapted to counter this factor by many agencies as part of an ant i-racist or move general equal opportunities policy. This strategy con centrated on limiting individual officer discretion near the point of service delivery in favour of formalising procedures and monitoring ou tcomes. In this paper we re-examine the role of officer discretion and look at the way that differing local institutional discourses of raci al and ethnic difference, particularly essentialist ones, affect the w ay that housing outcomes ave produced and either made visible or hidde n. 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 usin g a gaming metaphor is helpful in examining the way that different int erests and players interact at different levels in the process of hous ing 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.