Since the 1970s, social housing estates within Western capitalist cities have been linked to marginalisation processes in relation to poverty and deprivation. This chapter examines marginalisation at London's estates with reference to three analytical frameworks: residualisation, social exclusion and socio-tenurial polarisation. While acknowledging that such approaches have considerable credibility – especially in socioeconomic terms – the chapter develops a multi-stranded critique of how they frame and analyse marginalisation. This critique embraces three main themes: employment and class; social inclusion and diversity; and tenure preferences. This critique draws upon interview data regarding tenants’ labour and housing market experiences. The final section focuses on the shifting interrelationship between homelessness and social housing.

Public housing and marginalisation

The marginalisation of UK public housing has been examined through various analytical frameworks including residualisation (Forrest and Murie, 1991), social exclusion (SEU, 1998) and socio-tenurial polarisation (Hamnett, 2003). Residualisation means public renting transformed during the 1970s to 1990s from general needs housing, catering for a broad swathe of the working class, to a residual ‘tenure of last resort’ for a poor, largely ‘non-working class’ (Forrest and Murie, 1991). The latter include deprived and socially marginalised groups that were too poor to enter owner-occupation – the unemployed, sick and disabled, lone-parent families, the homeless, BAME groups, unskilled workers, and so on (Forrest and Murie, 1991; Hamnett, 2003).

If residualisation began during the 1970s, it intensified during the 1980s due to a series of policy and social developments. The Housing (Homeless Persons) Act 1977 contributed towards residualisation by allowing those with ‘priority need’ greater access into local authority housing thereby eroding its base in the general population (Somerville, 1994; Fitzpatrick and Pawson, 2016). The RTB was a key policy driver of residualisation because it allowed better-off tenants in more affluent rural and suburban districts to buy their houses, leaving behind a rump tenure of older, decaying council flats in inner-city areas (Forrest and Murie, 1991; Murie, 2016). Public housing also became residualised within the welfare state since it suffered more from Thatcherite cuts than any other welfare area (Balchin, 1995), as discussed in previous chapters. In addition to these policy factors, deindustrialisation was a major cause of residualisation (Forrest and Murie, 1991).