Towards the comparative exploration of public housing segregation in England and the United States

Abstract

This paper is an exploration of the treatment of racial minorities by public sector housing agencies in Britain and the United States over the last several decades, with the objective of describing empirical and policy differences and similarities. Public housing programmes in each country have been, at differing points in time, important cornerstone's of the welfare state but each has become a residualised sector of the housing delivery system. In the context of such residualisation, the key issue to consider is whether British council housing is likely to reproduce the patterns of racial segregation, impoverishment, and discrimination which are endemic in the American public housing system.

A variety of administrative agency reports and data, court cases, as well as case studies of race and public housing policies in the US and England have been used in this paper (Smith and Whalley, 1975; Commission for Racial Equality seriatim; Hirsch, 1983; Bauman, 1987; Department of the Environment; Smith, 1989). Unpublished tables for the English Housing Trailer for the 1988 Labour Force Survey were provided by the Department of the Environment.

Despite the presence of such information, there are a number of resource and data gathering concerns that affect the understanding of the interrelationships between race, class, and public housing policy on a comparative basis including: constrained research resources; unreliable data collection procedures; unavailability of time series data; and chronically limited research on civil rights/organisational effectiveness (Liebert, 1981). Despite these shortcomings, there are a significant number of both academic and applied studies in the area which suggest basic themes, issues and hypotheses for future examination.