ABSTRACT
Local authority housing was first built on a significant scale in Britain in the 1920s and its growth, broadly coinciding with that of owner-occupation, has transformed the tenure structure and largely replaced privately rented accommodation. Many factors affect what makes for more and less attractive housing and these cannot be discussed at length here; but in any area there is almost bound to be a hierarchy of acceptability or popularity. Some council housing is unsatisfactory by any standards but a great deal more would be considered reasonable in one area and poor in another. The importance of this distinction is borne out when one moves from physical to social conditions: almost invariably unpopularity is associated with the existence of a deprived population. The processes whereby deprived people are concentrated in parts of the public sector are the central concern of this chapter.
