ABSTRACT
So far we have dealt with the social and spatial impacts of council house sales at different levels. Patterns of social and spatial polarisation can be identified within cities and between regions. There is an accumulation of evidence that council housing is becoming more clearly associated with various groups in the population which might be appropriately labelled marginal. British council housing is becoming the form of housing provision for those excluded from the mainstream of social consumption; a mainstream characterised by individualised, commodity consumption fuelled by credit finance. And the owner occupied house occupies a pivotal position in that process. Progressively, being a council tenant signifies relative poverty. From its historical role as a tenure of relative privilege for the skilled working classes, low investment, privatisation and the stigmatised building of particular periods are combining with the growth of the unemployed and the working-class elderly to produce a quite different set of social relations. Underprivilege is not, however, confined to council housing. On the contrary, there are pockets of deprivation in both the privately rented sector and in owner occupation and homelessness, overcrowding and involuntary sharing are prominent features of Britain in the 1980s. But the worst aspects of deprivation tend to be less visible and less concentrated than the mass high rise housing and dump estates which dominate large sections of cities.
