Based on an ethnographic survey carried out within six social housing organizations, this article reinvestigates the issue of social housing allocations from the angle of the professional practices of those who implement them. It draws on micro-institutionalist theory, combining contributions from street-level bureaucracy and neo-institutionalism, to overcome some of the pitfalls of "bottom-up" approaches to public action, by articulating different levels of analysis and prioritizing explanations of bureaucratic work. From this perspective, the survey highlights the weight of organizational logics, and qualifies the influence of situational and dispositional factors. Indeed, while agents' social properties shape their conceptions of the job and their registers of actions, they are less decisive when it comes to explaining counter behaviour. Similarly, while interactions can modulate certain allocation decisions, there are few such adjustments, and they are contained by the institutional environment.

The 3DS law closes a cycle of reforms to social housing allocation policy opened eight years earlier by the Alur law. These legislative changes led to the gradual generalization of demand rating as the main instrument for allocating social housing. The use of local experimentation has enabled certain towns to position themselves as model territories, and the State to regain its capacity for action in a sector historically regulated a minima .