Marine Bourgeois, Sciences Po Grenoble, Pacte-CNRS

The allocation of social housing is subject to an impressive legal and regulatory arsenal, structured around two competing and non-hierarchical two competing and non-hierarchical categories of public action: social mix and the right to housing. Faced with these normative ambiguities, the HLM (Habitation à loyer modéré) organizations and their institutional partners define the priorities of social housing: they manage entry flows qualify and categorize files, sort and select households, in order to place the to place the "right" applicant in the "right" place. right place. The lack of a definition of the principle of diversity, combined with inability of local authorities to draw up allocation standards and impose to impose themselves on social landlords, contribute to the construction of settlement strategies.

While research into housing allocation is already there is already a great deal of research into housing allocations, it has more often than not neglected the study of professional practices. professional practices. Yet social housing employees play a central role play a central role in the allocation process: they evaluate to distinguish between those who are worthy of housing and those who are not. who are not; they use visible characteristics such as skin color or patronymic color or family name, to infer characteristics that are unobservable, but but relevant to them, about lifestyles and ways of living. of living.

Combining public policy analysis and sociology of work, this article is based on an ethnographic survey conducted between February 2011 and March 2015 in six HLM organizations in three French cities. Based on semi-structured interviews and observations observations, the survey consisted in observing the concrete operation of the allocation chain, from the moment a housing application is submitted to its to the allocation committee. It highlights three effects of of managerial changes in the allocation process: more stringent supervision of field agents, their heightened sensitivity to the issues of housing to settlement issues, and increased discrimination in access to social housing. social housing stock.

Managerial reforms, and risk prevention

Social landlords have not escaped the "modernization the "modernization" of public administrations that began in the 1980s. Managerial reforms take many forms. forms. Firstly, recruitment and training methods have evolved towards a more commercial approach to the job. have evolved towards a more commercial approach to the job. Among all new recruits are, on average, better qualified than their elders. their elders. They are also more likely to be real estate specialists. With a BEP or CAP, the most experienced agents are, on the contrary, most of them entered the social housing sector by chance.

Social housing employees adopt three registers of action. Firstly, the administrative register, which is is characterized by a concern for procedures and compliance with rules. agents give priority to checking administrative documents than contact with the public. Secondly, the social register, which is based on the the assistance aspect of their work: agents are always ready to listen listening to customers, showing empathy during interviews and emphasizing their their "social fiber". The commercial register, which echoes the figure of the real estate agent: social housing social housing professionals prioritize the marketing of housing efficiency above all other objectives. The survey reveals affinities between these registers of action and the agents' career paths. The are over-represented near the administrative hub. The middle generation makes massive use of the figure of the social worker while younger recruits are more likely to adopt a commercial style. commercial style. Changes in training courses and recruitment methods contribute to a gradual shift in these types of action from the administrative and social spheres to the commercial sphere, in both OPHs (public-sector in both OPH (public-sector) and ESH (private-sector).

Marketing and advertising techniques have, and advertising techniques have also been widely adopted by lessors. Local agencies have been set up to reinforce proximity to customers. Performance and individual performance bonuses were introduced to optimize optimize case processing. The monitoring and evaluation of activities are now based on a large number of indicators and dashboards, including vacancy management (number of proposals made, number of visits carried out, number of number of visits carried out, number of files referred to the allocation committee, number of new arrivals), rental arrears (number of home visits, number of customers customers received at the agency) and neighborhood disturbances.

In the interests of streamlining, the organization of the organization has also been modified, with a view to making tasks more versatility. Allocation managers no longer simply sort and select applications sort and select applications, but divide their time between carrying out inventory of fixtures, home visits and cleanliness checks in communal areas. in common areas. They also take care of pre-litigation management and and initial neighborhood disturbances. This diversification of to improve the "quality of service rendered". service". For management teams, multi-skilling is also a way of "empowering a way of "empowering" field staff, by putting them in a position the consequences of their choices.

This new division of labor, combined with a policy based on numbers, requires employees to respond to the hierarchical injunction to "rent as quickly as possible", while limiting rental risks (neighborhood disturbances, unpaid rent). This position of "risk manager" leads allocation officers to make judgments about housing applicants from the point of view of the risks they represent for the landlord. Based on information contained in the files and clues gathered during face-to-face interviews, the work of categorizing households is structured around two main axes - resources and behaviors - which bring out four client figures: the "troublemaker" versus the "good family man", the "bad payer" versus the "good payer" (see graph). These figures represent a continuum of risk.

According to these categories, agents develop strategies to "rebalance" the social occupancy of residences. residences: this may involve not exceeding certain thresholds thresholds, preserving or sacrificing addresses, regrouping or, on the contrary or dispersing populations. For the majority of agents, population professional imperative" that makes them more "selective". makes them more "selective". Conversely, "filling in filling in" means "putting just anyone, anywhere to take the risk of increasing damage to the buildings, scaring off the the "good" tenants and slow down the marketing of the units. marketing. Torn between contradictory objectives, HLM agents are faced with a dilemma. are faced with a dilemma. On the one hand, they have to relet the units as quickly as possible. as quickly as possible, at the risk of degrading the social housing stock. On the other hand, they are seeking to maintain a "balanced at the cost of high vacancy rates. This tension has become even more acute with managerial reforms. Today, it goes beyond the divide between OPH between OPH and ESH, and concerns all HLM employees, whether they see their work whether they see their work as commercial, social or administrative.

Stand strategies as risk management risk management methods

At another level, the heads of organizations are developing tools to act more directly on the socio-spatial distribution of populations. The stated objective is always the same: limit neighborhood conflicts (management register) and facilitate the marketing of housing (commercial register). Based on empirical knowledge scientific theories (such as the tipping point theory) and descriptive descriptive statistics, these tools aim to identify "difficult "populations", classify buildings and rank individuals. individuals.

The qualification of residences is the result of a collective exercise carried out with the support of field agents. It is based on their their perception of building life, irrespective of the location of the regardless of housing location or rent levels. The "targets include references to age (retired, student), socio-professional status socio-professional status (permanent, fixed-term, temporary, RSA) and housing (people leaving hostels, people leaving prison). They reveal "at-risk groups groups" emerge, revealing the way in which the institution between "good" and "bad" applicants: the former are candidates: the former are placed in the "quietest" buildings "buildings in the stock, while the latter are rehoused on the relocated to "bad" addresses. This policy discriminates when entering the social housing stock, and reinforces micro segregation at stairwell level.

In addition to their population control objectives, they are also designed to supervise staff, train and integrate new recruits training and integration of new recruits, in the sense that they encourage the the internalization of rules and standardize behavior. These tools carry instructions for staff, designed to limit their discretionary power. discretionary power. At the counter, they are the focus of much criticism. From the agents' point of view, the instructions are too rigid. They devalue proximity judgments

The field survey reveals, however, that the vast majority of customer comply with them. Bypasses are and are even provided for by the lessor. Combined with the individual bonuses, allocation committees can, for example, be used to monitor for example, to control and call to order field agents who deviate from the instructions. Middle management also plays a central role in ensuring compliance with professional practices.

In the end, agents are caught up in particularly strong constraints, leading them to tighten up their selection practices at the counter selection practices, whether by adopting a rigorous attitude to discriminatory rigorist attitude to discriminatory settlement rules, the exclusion of groups considered groups deemed to be at risk, or by concentrating them in the most depreciated segments of the social housing stock. These logics contribute to the reproduction and amplification of inequalities and discrimination in access to social housing, as well as reinforcing as well as reinforcing internal segregation.

Transformations of the HLM model customer risk

The managerialization of allocation work and the are part of the same dynamic. They overlap and mutually reinforce each other: settlement tools are used to supervise the supervision and control of professional practices, while managerial managerial tools help to ensure that settlement issues are taken into account at the settlement issues. To understand this interdependent relationship, the notion of risk the notion of risk. The development of settlement strategies aims to encourage the anticipation and prevention of risks that threaten "residential balances".

The issue of risk has always been present in social housing. Although the most disadvantaged populations were not always given priority access to low-cost housing, the latter was historically built on the principle of managing the risks to which households were exposed, in order to protect them from the hazards of life. The shift in the HLM model is therefore not due to the emergence of risk, but rather to its inversion. It is no longer the risk to the applicant that is taken into account, but the risk that the applicant represents for the institution, and which must be assessed. This inversion of risk has been reinforced by managerial reforms, producing two effects: on the one hand, the erosion of the social vocation of the HLM housing stock; on the other, the reinforcement of discriminatory practices in the social housing allocation process.

A longer version of this analysis was originally published on the website Métropolitiques on March 18, 2019.