Paper short abstract:

Debates around social housing often revolve around deservingness claims. This paper interrogates the motives for and practices of classification in Flanders' social housing policy reform, showing how a moralised category of 'the deserving local' is constructed to legitimise exclusionary practices.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropologists have shown how debates around public and social housing have become increasingly moralised (Alexander et al 2018), thus often revolving around claims of deservingness. In 2023, the government of Flanders introduced a fundamental restructuring of its social housing policy. A key feature of the reforms was a renewed set of allocation criteria. The Dutch language requirement has been increased, and ‘local ties’ to a neighbourhood afford people priority on wait-lists. One further rule for prospective tenants also applies to current tenants: mandatory registration with the public employment service. According to the minister of housing, the policy reforms will “contribute to the emancipation of the social tenant” and ensure that social housing becomes available to the “right” people.

In this paper, I interrogate the motives for and practices of classification with regards to the policy reform. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with a social housing cooperative for migrants, as well as a discourse analysis of political and public debates on the reform, I analyse the ways in which the new allocation criteria are legitimised as well as contested. Departing from the concept of deservingness as a conceptual heuristic (Streinzer and Tosic 2022), I discuss how the new criteria reframe ‘migrant undeservingness’ through the construction of a moralised category of ‘the deserving local’. Tracing policy assumptions about the groups of people that the allocation criteria (should) target, I argue that the classification of who is deserving functions as an exclusionary mechanism and reveals contestations between group-specific and generic approaches in policy-making.