ABSTRACT
The position and experience of ethnic minorities in the housing market has been well documented by academics, local authorities, the Commission for Racial Equality (Cre) and non-governmental organisations over the last twenty-five years. The earliest accounts revealed how newly arriving immigrants had little choice but to occupy the bottom end of the market, ending up in poor private rental properties or, in the case of Asians, purchasing cheap, deteriorating inner city terraced housing abandoned by the suburbanising whites (Rex and Moore, 1967). Distinct ethnic clusters emerged in the inner cities, the product of a number of often inter-related factors, namely: the immigrants’poverty and lack of knowledge of the housing market, their job opportunities, their desire for clustering for social and cultural reasons, and the blatant discrimination of the early post-war years. The pattern at this time was one of racial deprivation, segregation and inequality.
