Reified scarcity & the problem space of ‘need’: unpacking Australian social housing policy

Andrew Clarke, Lynda Cheshire, Cameron Parsell and Alan Morris

Housing Studies, 2024, vol. 39, issue 2, 565-583

Abstract: Social housing is today a highly residualised sector due to a combination of declining public investment and intensified targeting of stock to the neediest households. We argue that residualisation has opened up a distinct ‘problem space’ wherein policy making and debate are organised around a distinct set of questions and imperatives. Drawing on research into the management of social housing waitlists in Australia, we show how this problem space is characterised by a preoccupation with finding ever more fine-grained ways of targeting social housing to the neediest households in the context of growing scarcity of housing stock. Defining and operationalising ‘neediness’ becomes the focal point for policy making and struggles thereover, overshadowing questions of supply and broader debates about the role of social housing in addressing the housing crisis. The problem space of neediness is thus characterised by a tendency to reify social housing scarcity, transforming it into a natural and inevitable constraint that policy makers must simply manage.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/02673037.2022.2057933 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:chosxx:v:39:y:2024:i:2:p:565-583

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/chos20

DOI: 10.1080/02673037.2022.2057933

Access Statistics for this article

Housing Studies is currently edited by Chris Leishman, Moira Munro, Ray Forrest, Alex Schwartz, Hal Pawson and John Flint

More articles in Housing Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().