Housing consumers experience various forms of regulation in the sense that we have been using the term. They encounter ‘gatekeepers’ influencing access to accommodation and are subject to expectations about family and culture. Home-buyers have to meet specific criteria of incomes and health to obtain mortgage finance on reasonable terms. Applicants for renting or for supported or emergency accommodation may come up against rules and officials. A difference between households as perceived by a providing organisation may be a basis for negative or positive discrimination, deterrence or assistance. In effect housing practices help sort people, contributing to differentiation of citizenship as a lived experience. Many activities here – supportive or restrictive – have deep historical foundations, and connect with structural forces, but there are numerous challenges from the grass roots too, sometimes offering alternative discourses about housing rights, needs or citizenship. To understand housing experiences of disabled people, minority ethnic households or women, it is desirable to consider the broad frameworks within which most households are placed. Governmental policies and institutions confirm the status and resources of households, help position them in terms of access to accommodation, designate or classify them, and influence pathways during their housing ‘careers’. Options for individual households are influenced by public policies across all tenures, these policies in turn being linked with particular discourses about property, health, environment, merit, rewards, risk, conditionality, needs and so on.

To explore some of these matters, this chapter reviews practices and their effects. We begin with markets, and then look at ‘non-market’ housing, considering social renting and some competing or complementary concerns of contemporary policy. ‘Private’ housing markets are covered fairly swiftly, since many of their differentiating effects for groups of households are relatively straightforward and predictable, despite the distinctiveness of UK public policies affecting ownership and private renting. A somewhat more elaborate account is needed to explore social rented housing, because the motivations and potential effects of policies and services here have been complex, and perhaps sometimes even contradictory. We draw attention especially to practices and discourses related to social support and needs, to social control and the regulation of tensions, and to participation and citizenship.