Why social housing stigma is still one of the most prominent issues faced by tenants, and how we can go about countering it.
Quite recently, I was working with a group of tenants who wanted to tell their landlord how they felt judgement and discrimination from maintenance workers who visited their home. Although there were a few specific examples of sexism and racism, the main form of discrimination that all the tenants in the group described, in their own words, was social housing stigma.
We had managed to get some senior colleagues, including the relevant director, to the meeting. They listened intently and took the specific examples very seriously. They also encouraged tenants to use the complaints procedure, as complaints for the organisation showed very few reports related to equality, diversity, and inclusion.
However, when tenants started to describe their feelings as being seen as ‘lesser’ because they lived in social housing, or when they described a “that’ll do for you” attitude from some workers, the colleagues found this more difficult to engage with. In fact, one colleague said, “social housing stigma does not exist at this organisation”. A bold statement indeed!
Although social housing stigma has been around for many, many years, it’s a relatively new concept for us to understand. The term seems to have come into common language around 2018, but even then, it took some time to take a hold. The brilliant CIH report ‘It’s not okay: A guide to tackling stigma in social housing’ (August 2020) kicked the housing sector into action, but the message is yet to trickle down into wider society.
I believe the colleague who denied the existence of social housing stigma thought he was doing the right thing. I think he was making a statement to say that the organisation knows it’s wrong and attempts to tackle it. But it is naïve to think that social housing stigma has been quashed because we know about it. We’ve known about other forms of stigma for much longer and we are still a long way from resolving them.
Countering the stigma of social housing
To make any progress in addressing social housing stigma, as with any other form of discrimination, we need to acknowledge it’s existence. We need to be able to have honest conversations about our understanding or lack of it. We need to acknowledge that we have absorbed information from our every day lives that tells us social housing is bad, and whether we want it to or not, this affects our views and conduct. Newspaper headlines about benefits cheats, TV programmes such as ‘Benefits Street’, the representation of social housing in programmes like ‘Happy Valley’ and ‘Shameless’ and even the government’s obsession with home ownership all bombard us with messages that people who live in social housing are the underclass.
While society believes this, we contribute to a self-fulfilling prophesy for tenants. It takes more effort to feel pride in your home, more effort to trust and respect your neighbours, more effort to commit to the local community. Everyone is already putting so much effort into working, caring for families, and just surviving that they might not have anything else to give.
The housing sector needs to pull together to raise the profile of social housing stigma so that wider society becomes more aware of the issues. As individuals, we need to acknowledge our biases and work to overcome them. Some of those biases are unconscious so it will be hard work, but the pay off will be a better world to live in. One with more pride and less shame.
Noone ever knows what is around the corner and we never know if social housing might be the best option for us, now or in the future. We need to work hard to make sure that the reality is the same as the vision: safe, affordable housing you can take pride in, without any extra effort.
