ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role played by the interaction of the labour market and the housing market in the production of spatial variations in social stratification. The case for emphasising the role played by the housing market in the geographical concentration of the less skilled in the inner cities and the more highly skilled in the suburbs and metropolitan peripheries is a strong one. Put at its simplest it involves just three linked propositions. The first is that access to the different housing tenures is unequally distributed. Whilst access to owner occupation is controlled primarily by price and income mediated by the availability of mortgage finance, access to the council sector is controlled by the waiting list, the points system and the allocational procedures. It also results from the tenurial, price and allocational structure of the housing market, the resultant pattern of social and economic differentiation and the 'frictional drag' which housing exerts on the mobility of labour.
