Public housing and the politics of stigma.

Jacobs, Keith ; Flanagan, Kathleen

Introduction

The key argument that informs this paper is that the stigmatisation of public housing and its portrayal as a failure has important consequences for tenants but also for agencies and individuals seeking to counter such negative perceptions. There is a substantive existing literature on the causes of stigma and possible solutions to it. However, as we will argue, the dominant conceptualisation of policy-making as a rational and evidence-based process conceals the strategic challenge posed by the diversity of views held by stakeholders on the most appropriate and effective way to respond. Teasing out this challenge illuminates some of the reasons why suggested strategies to tackle stigma may not have the expected impact. The paper begins with a precis of the relevant literature and the methodology that we deployed over the course of the investigation. The main part provides a discussion of the way that stigma has been framed in both policy and public discourse and the role of the media in accentuating stigma. The final part of the paper assesses the dilemmas raised by different strategies to address stigma.

In Australia, despite a growing not-for-profit sector, the main social housing response continues to be State and Territory-managed public housing, in terms of the funding provided, the number of housing units available and the number of households accommodated (SCRGSP 2013: G.6). Despite its importance within the social housing sector, however, public housing makes up less than 5 per cent of the total housing stock in Australia (Yates 2013), and is viewed by both the general public and policymakers as a failed system that compounds social and economic disadvantage (see Yates 2008; Jacobs et al. 2013; Yates 2013).

As we discuss in this paper there are complex reasons for this perception of public housing but much can be attributed to the shortage of funds made available for management and renewal. Annual funding for the sector has been in long-term decline since the mid 1980s, apart from a $5.6 billion injection as part of the National Economic Stimulus package in 2008-09 to mitigate the impact of the global financial crisis. The shortage of funds was most evident in the period from 1989 to 2001, during which annual funds declined by 26 per cent--$75 million at 2001 prices (Berry & Williams 2011). Housing authorities have also had to grapple with an increase in demand and, with insufficient funds to build new stock, they have had no option but to restrict the allocation of vacant properties to those with high social needs (Hulse et al. 2011). The broad thrust of Federal government policy is to encourage the community housing and the private rental sector to meet the future demand for low cost housing and to reduce the concentration of large public housing estates by funding renewal programs that diversify the stock (Arthurson 2012). The view of public housing within government is encapsulated in a speech made by the then Housing Minister Tanya Plibersek in 2009 in which she reiterated the conventional characterisation of public housing estates as chronically affected by drug dealing, antisocial behaviour, lack of mutual support and trust, joblessness, dislocation, isolation and 'an expectation [among young people] that they will grow up to rely on public housing, as their parents have done' (Plibersek 2009: 4).

The concept of stigma: an attribution and a lens

An understanding of the different ways in which the concept of stigma is deployed is necessary if we are to consider the potential and the limitations of different policy interventions. Therefore, in this part of the paper we draw upon recent literature and make the distinction between the concept of stigma as a term to describe how people experience negative attribution and its deployment as a sociological lens to interpret disadvantage. Much of the academic literature on stigma has been informed by the work of Erving Goffman's (1963) essay, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Goffman understood stigma as a way to describe social processes involving individuals and groups who are imbued with negative traits that transgress societal norms. This judgment is not only experienced negatively but also serves to reinforce poor self-esteem and feelings of failure. Goffman's conceptualisation serves as a basis for considering why so many public housing tenants feel culpable for their predicament (Warr 2005a; Wacquant 2007; Kelaher et al. 2010). Stigma therefore encompasses both a subjective experience and a description of the process of labelling individuals and groups (Major & O'Brien 2005).

An important contribution on the impact of stigma is set out by Reutter and colleagues (2009). They make the point, based on their research in Toronto and Edmonton, Canada, that stigma is often experienced as a disjuncture between how an individual assumes others see them (the virtual) and how they see themselves (actual). They argue that for those living in poverty, it is common to internalise pathological assumptions and to project onto others in similar situations negative attributes as a coping mechanism; a sense of feeling stigmatised can be viewed as a defence mechanism to offset fearful feelings about poverty and exclusion (see also Waxman 1983; Crocker 1999). Like many other sweeping frames about 'the way things are', the stigmatisation of public housing tenants is often viewed as unproblematic, with judgments about tenants formed on the basis of anecdote, generalisations or stereotypes and without reference to power relationships or systemic inequality (Wassenberg 2004; Permentier et al. 2008; Arthurson 2010).

It can be discerned from the above literature that to understand the causes of stigma requires us to situate the processes of stigmatisation in the context of asymmetrical power dynamics. For as Goffman (1963) makes clear, the impact of stigmatisation depends on the balance of power within societal relationships. In the case of public housing tenants, stigma is applied to a group of people with little social power by dominant cultural and social groupings. It is worth asking whether the stigmatisation of vulnerable groups such as social housing tenants persists because such stigmatisation is seen by the wider society as largely unproblematic. The consideration of stigma in policy settings tends to focus on the characteristics and behaviour of the victims within specific neighbourhoods, rather than the power relations and cultural frames that are in play.

Despite the research that has sought to understand the causal factors that accentuate stigma (see Reidpath et al. 2005), very little empirical research has focussed on strategies to tackle the impact of stigma on Australian public housing. The research that has been undertaken (Bradbury & Chalmers 2003; Mee 2004; Palmer et al. 2004, 2005; Randolph et al. 2004; Ziersch & Baum 2004; Ziersch & Arthurson 2005; Atkinson & Jacobs 2010) shows how stigma and negative representations operate as a barrier to improving education and employment opportunities and levels of private sector investment in neighbourhoods with a high concentration of public housing tenants. This research also supports the argument that stigma effects are reinforced by the unequal power dynamics within society; as Link and Phelan (2001: 367) write, the impact of stigma is 'contingent on access to social, economic and political power that allows the identification of differentness, the construction of stereotypes, the separation of labelled persons and discrimination'. In research conducted overseas and Australia, the stigmatised status of public housing locales has been shown to serve as a rationale to legitimise opposition to new social housing development in more affluent neighbourhoods (see Goetz 2000; Ruming 2013).

Methodology

The links between stigma and inequality and systemic disadvantage set out above explain some of the policy inertia in this area. The absence of explicit policy to reduce public housing stigma and a consideration of the practical strategies that might be feasible provided the rationale for our research project. The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) provided funds for the investigation (Jacobs et al. 2011) and our methods complied with their preference for a panel form of investigation to bring together experts with a range of experiences to interrogate a specific question. As researchers, we felt that the strength of the AHURI format was that it encouraged participants to probe and consider issues theoretically and practically and we therefore deemed it a suitable vehicle to conduct our investigation. The panel membership included three academics, a journalist, two practitioners from the housing sector and a doctoral student, all of whom had expertise in this field. (A fourth academic, from an overseas university, also provided input and advice.) The meetings were convened between June and October 2010. The first and third were attended solely by the Australian panel members, but the second included a range of other invitees.

It is worth acknowledging that, in reaching conclusions about particular issues, the panel investigation format as we conducted it does not use quantifiable analytical tools to reach conclusions. Rather, participants' contributions are guided by their own area of interest and expertise, and consensus positions emerge from an ongoing process of exchange, discussion and reflection. This means that, methodologically, the panel adopts an interpretivist approach to data generation and analysis. However, the focus on discussion and interaction means that a potential limitation of the panel investigation format is that the investigation becomes too wide-ranging and diffuse. To address this, in advance of the first meeting, we circulated a literature review of the salient issues and terms of reference to the team. Our first meeting in Hobart focused on identifying the causal factors associated with stigma and a consideration of its effects. In the second meeting, which took place in Melbourne in late September, we considered the role of the media in portraying and explaining social disadvantage and strategies that can be deployed to address stigma. Among the 19 participants who attended the Melbourne meeting were public housing residents and community representatives, housing sector professionals, and senior media educators and practitioners. The final panel meeting took place in late October in Hobart where we reviewed the evidence that we had collated, identified gaps in knowledge and advanced suggestions for future research avenues.

Over the course of the three meetings we were mindful of the need to interrogate contrasting opinions and connect the theoretical approaches to understanding housing stigma with more applied, practical strategies for addressing it. We also wanted, in our meeting in Melbourne, to capture the lived experience of public housing tenants and the different views of advocates, professionals and academics.

The data we collected from these panel discussions were transcribed and thematically analysed across three themes aligned to the topics we agreed at our first panel meeting in Hobart. The first theme encompassed the systemic, agency and ideological factors that have been attributed as causes of stigma in the academic literature. The second theme combined the wider discourses that frame policy debate and the specific role played by the media in reinforcing stigma. The third theme incorporated the range of innovative policies that could be deployed to address stigma. The transcriptions of the meeting provided us with data to compare and contrast the different perspectives of academics, media practitioners, policy makers and tenants. Our analysis of the data form the basis for both the explanations and arguments set out in this paper.

Our hope was that our panel discussions would generate ideas for practical interventions. This hope was fulfilled and some good ideas did emerge, but the experience of the panel discussions also revealed that, even within a circle of participants who were supportive of public housing, keen to participate and willing to place suggestions on the table, there were many important conceptual, strategic and practical challenges. The existence of these challenges can be obscured by the dominant construction of policy-making as a rational process, responsive to evidence, but they are important reasons why policy intervention sometimes goes astray. It is these challenges that we explore in the following section of the paper.

Causes of stigma

At our first meeting we considered the causes of stigma and the implications of the negative portrayal of public housing tenants. We discussed the tendency of policy-makers and others to attribute many of the symptoms associated with stigma, such as crime or anti-social behaviour, to what are in fact effectively other symptoms, such as the large number of socioeconomically disadvantaged households living in poorly-serviced, poorly-supported public housing estates. Such a conflation, it was agreed, leads to both a confused diagnosis of the problem and a confused policy response. It was noted that there are two clear causal factors that have led to public housing's poor reputation. Both stem from government policies--first, the systemic underinvestment that has forced State housing authorities to reduce their overall stock (Hall & Berry 2007) and second, the targeted allocation policies that have restricted the diversity of households able to access public housing (Yates 2013). The combination of these policies has served to reinforce the reputation of public housing within the wider community as a tenure of last resort that is inferior to both homeownership and private renting (Burke et al. 2005).

Yet in spite of the culpability of these policy decisions, we argue that it is not uncommon for policy-makers and government agencies to frame contemporary public housing as a cause of stigma, crime, social disorder and welfare dependency. This framing is not only misconstrued but also a major reason why the problem of stigmatisation appears so difficult to address (see Kelahar et al. 2010). With more investment to increase supply and operational viability, thus supporting less restrictive allocations policies, it is quite possible to address the underlying factors that have accentuated stigma. It is not inevitable that public housing be seen in the way in which it is.

The framing of housing 'problems'

At the first panel meeting, we considered how housing problems are explained, or 'framed', by policy-makers, media coverage, academia and the wider community. The view of the panel members was that these explanatory frames for particular housing 'problems', informed by ideology, exert an influence over housing policy decisions. We have identified three such frames at play in contemporary Australia.

The first frame we have labelled 'pathological' in that it explains problems such as place-based disadvantage, crime and anti-social behaviour by attributing them to individual agency, in particular the life style and choices of the individuals who reside in public housing. This framing is evident in tabloid media stories in the press and television reality programs such as 'Neighbours from Hell', consistent with the social exclusion discourse identified by Levitas (2005) as the 'moral underclass discourse'. Pathological explanations also conflate poverty with public housing: that is, all public housing tenants are poor and all poor people are public housing tenants, even when this is not true. According to this explanatory frame, stigma is an understandable response by the mainstream community to the poor choices and behaviour of public housing tenants (see Arthurson (2012) and Atkinson and Jacobs (2010) for an extended discussion).

The second frame views stigma through structural factors like income inequality and spatial disadvantage. A structural explanation understands stigma as a symptom of income inequality and the policy settings that perpetuate income inequality, and therefore argues that its amelioration is only possible through a significant redistribution of resources from rich to poor. This frame is often used by academics (see, for example, Darcy 2009; Atkinson & Jacobs 2010; Arthurson 2012) researching housing policy (including by us in this paper) but is generally eschewed by policy makers, perhaps because a response built on this frame would be too costly, but also, in some cases, because of their adherence to one of the other frameworks (Darcy 2009).

The third frame is one of managerialism--here the problem of stigma is attributed to a failure of the welfare state and its promotion of welfare dependency. A managerial frame attributes stigma to the failure of services and the need for the institutions of government to engage in administrative reform, place-based intervention and service refinements. Because it is most apparent in public housing estates, the problem of stigma is defined as a 'housing problem', which means sole responsibility is allocated to housing authorities, accompanied by an assumption that housing authorities can solve the problem (see Lupton & Tunstall 2008 for a UK discussion of this frame). According to the managerial frame, governments and housing authorities can address the problem by improving the provision of support services to public housing tenants and by putting in place incentives to encourage tenants into employment, reducing their reliance on income support payments. Darcy (2009) provides an example of this framing in a document published by the NSW Department of Housing entitled 'Building Partnerships: Transforming Estates into Communities' which stated that 'community disadvantage is compounded by estates' often poor location, their design and the high concentrations of public housing they bring to an area. These issues combine to create social exclusion' (NSW Department of Housing 1999: 3).

These frames are not discrete, but generally the pathological and managerial narratives intertwine to inform both popular understandings and government interventions to address stigma. There is a general tendency to understand the problems experienced by those living in disadvantaged housing estates in terms of cause, blame and responsibility (see Mee 2004; Wacquant 2007; Warr 2005a, 2005b). Stigma is attributed to the lifestyle of those living in public housing, a lifestyle created and directed by the fact of living in public tenure, and the blame and responsibility rests with tenants who reside there. There is also a tendency to view the individual problems faced by tenants as issues that can be successfully addressed by appropriately designed services. Thus there is a focus on redesigning, reforming and improving services, rather than on structural change. These tendencies have informed successive housing policy interventions and continue to do so.

Therefore, although the management of tenants' behaviour has always been a component of housing policy discourse, over the last 20 years or so there has been a discernable shift in emphasis, away from a discussion about underinvestment, allocation policies and the wider socioeconomic context and towards one that focuses on management and administration within public housing authorities (Darcy 2009). This has been accompanied by a growing focus on the perceived anti-social behaviour of tenants and initiatives, such as 'three strikes' policies, that could be put in place to address this--for example, in Western Australia a mandatory 'three strikes' policy applies even to incidents of 'minor' disruption, with three substantiated 'minor' incidents within 12 months leading to eviction proceedings 'in all instances' (WA Department of Housing 2012: 84)--and on what can be termed 'spatial ordering' (see Lupton & Tunstall 2008: 110). It is now claimed that large concentrations of public housing are inherently problematic and the task of housing policy is configured as a set of measures to facilitate social integration by 'breaking up' public housing estates through support for homeownership and community sector and private involvement. There is an intensive policy focus on those communities where the concentration of public housing properties is high, even though the sector as a whole features a wide variety of built forms and levels of dispersion. Initiatives such as urban or community renewal programs, tenant participation strategies, stock transfer and public-private partnerships are now stock in trade for Australian state housing authorities (see for example NSW Department of Housing 2007). Reducing 'concentrations of disadvantage' through 'appropriate redevelopment' was one of the conditions attached to the housing component of the 2009 Nation Building and Jobs Plan economic stimulus package which provided $5.5 billion nationally for social housing construction, repair and maintenance (Council of Australian Governments 2009: 14).

The assumption behind these policies, particularly the 'break up' of estates, is that public housing tenants would benefit both culturally and economically from greater contact with owner-occupiers, who can be brought into the community as part of the redevelopment. There is a considerable amount of research that has considered the claims made in support of such 'social mixing' (for reviews, see Arthurson 2004; Darcy 2009; Arthurson 2012). While there is insufficient space to delve into the arguments for and against, we note that social mix policies rely on a discursive construction of public housing as a problematic tenure rather than one that accords tangible benefits like security and shelter, and, therefore, publicly-expressed anxiety over the lack of social mix in public housing estates feeds ongoing stigmatisation.

At the end of our first panel meeting, we reviewed each of the three frames and agreed that it was the second of the three explanatory frames, focussing on inequality and government policy decisions, that was the most compelling for our analysis. The third frame, stressing responses focussed on improving service delivery and resolving issues within public housing management, also had some support. We agreed, however, that the pathological frame, focussing on the behaviour and cultural attributes of public housing tenants, did not explain stigma so much as exacerbate it.

Media

At our second meeting we retained a focus on the negative effects of stereotyping the residents of public housing by exploring the role played by the media (Silverstone 1999; Croteau & Hoynes 2000). For example, a panel participant who worked in a disadvantaged community provided examples of a jingle broadcast by a popular radio station about the 'bogan culture' of public housing estates, and a picture of a modified Monopoly board that circulated online, bearing, among other stereotypical content, a repeated version of the image usually confined to one corner square of an ordinary Monopoly board: 'go to jail, go to jail, go to jail'. According to this participant and others, tenants in the area were well aware of the stereotypes that were applied to them, and tried to 'laugh them off' by pointing to aspects of their dress and personal habits that matched the stereotype. However, the participant also said that upon further discussion it became clear that tenants resented the stereotypes, and were distressed by the free and careless way in which they were used.

These are crude examples of how the pathological explanation for stigma dominates in the wider community. The 'bogan' in Australia (Nichols 2011) or the 'chav' in the United Kingdom (Jones 2011) serve various functions in popular culture, but one of those functions is to bolster the argument that people in public housing are stigmatised because, frankly, they deserve to be --that their attitudes, their decisions, their behaviour and their appearance all demand derision and disdain.

There was agreement among the meeting participants that unsympathetic portrayals of public housing and public housing tenants, by the media and by other popular culture outlets, fuel the growth of stigma. Such portrayals, however, need to be understood in context--the media operates in a competitive environment where there is considerable commercial pressure on journalists to deliver stories that are entertaining and have broad appeal. The most appealing stories about public housing are those that frame it negatively--such accounts provoke the necessary emotional response from the audience. As Cohen (1980) has argued, the pathologising of specific social groups can be understood using the terminology of 'moral panics' or media 'amplification', particularly when they arise in periods of insecurity and social dislocation. Evidence from the United Kingdom is that most media accounts of public housing are negative and that when positive stories are published, they often contain references to earlier, negative stories to provide 'context' and to explain why this positive story is 'newsworthy' (Dean & Hastings 2000). Sometimes these positive news stories can be patronising, taking on the flavour of a 'little community that could'.

As noted above, there are a number of narrative 'frames' that can be placed around public housing and its stigmatised status. These frames, by defining the source of the problem, also define the source of the solution. Because the media both reflects and contributes to the perpetuation of these frames, the frames that the media chooses to privilege are important; they are part of the process of agenda-setting within the political system (Stone 1989). Yet panel members generally conceded that in their experience, 'good news is not news'. While there was no lack of good news stories about public housing, there was a lack of interest, particularly from the commercial media, in reporting those stories. One panel member suggested that it might also be the case that 'no news is good news': so-called 'normal' neighbourhoods don't tend to appear in the news for any reason--good or bad.

A common tactic used by community groups--perhaps in response to the fact that it is usually sought out by media outlets--is to attach a personal 'face' to the story. A profile of a community garden, for example, might be 'topped and tailed' by an interview with a resident who volunteers in the garden and accompanied by a suitable photograph of the smiling resident. The argument is that this approach engenders a personal narrative focused on the individuals who are making a positive difference within the community, as opposed to framing the communities and the individuals within them as homogenous, depersonalised and dysfunctional. The danger, however, is that in focussing on individual stories, activists are giving credence to explanations of stigma that focus on individual choices and behaviour rather than those that emphasise structural barriers.

Evidence from the United Kingdom (Dean & Hastings 2000) shows that community media outlets in some local areas are actively involved in publishing or running positive news stories and disseminating positive messages about estates. Participants in the panel felt similarly that local community newspapers offered the most accessible pathway towards challenging stigma. There were two main attractions to this strategy--firstly, stories that present the local community in a positive light are deemed as worthy of particular interest and coverage by community media outlets and secondly, community media outlets are more accessible to local residents.

But, as the latter point implies, reliance on community media also has limitations. In Australia, the 'reach' of local media is limited. It lacks the audience and the influence of larger, more populist or more authoritative media sources, which means that any positive coverage in community media does not carry enough weight, in either audience numbers or profile and status, to counter negative stories from larger outlets. It is also limited in its geographical scope--as participants on the panel pointed out, the readership of most community newspapers and similar outlets is confined to the local area, where people are already familiar with the estate being talked about. Thus community media stories are effectively 'preaching to the converted', while beyond the boundaries of the local community, the negative messages continue and the stigma remains unchallenged.

Reaching the mainstream media with positive stories about local communities, or to counter negative ones, is however difficult. Panel participants who lived and worked in disadvantaged areas clearly felt that there was a barrier between them and those working in the mainstream media. The depth of feeling relating to this was illustrated by the fact that some of the most emotional exchanges in the panel meeting were between tenants and mainstream journalists. There was also a divergence of views on who should be responsible for advocating on behalf of disadvantaged communities. Should it be state housing authorities, community groups, tenants' associations or tenants themselves? Should communities employ public relations professionals to 'manage' their area's image (Dean & Hastings 2000; Hastings 2004)? Should formal media training be rolled out to communities to support better advocacy with journalists? Should journalists be invited to become stakeholders in the community, rather than passive observers from the outside? Should communities focus on promoting positive stories or focus on myth-busting responses to negative stories that are printed? Should the aim be to 'normalise' public housing by, for example, injecting positive depictions of public housing and public housing tenants into well-known (fictional) television programs? Panellists were generally supportive of organisations and communities seeking to counter stigmatisation using media strategies. There was support for the use of electronic and social media, including blogs and social networking websites, to disseminate counterarguments and subvert dominant stereotypes.

On reflection, the discussions at our first two meetings served us well; our exchanges generated a de facto 'unpacking' of the theory, the barriers that impede policy action and the role of the media. Our engagement with the lived experience of tenants who experience stigma not only provided us with examples to probe and debate the effectiveness of policy interventions but also served to verify our agreement at our first panel meeting about the framing of public housing in contemporary policy and media discourses. The multiple perspectives available at the second meeting also drew attention to the challenges that beset any policy process aimed at ameliorating stigma. In the following section of the paper, we draw together data from the meetings to explore these challenges further.

The strategic dilemma

The central dilemma facing state housing authorities, community groups and tenants in tackling stigmatisation lies in the inadequate funding provided to public housing and the accumulated effect of the stresses this has created in the system. Strategies to address stigmatisation and the factors that cause it need to be supported by funding, yet the process of successfully attracting funding often requires the problems of public housing to be emphasised--which in itself, reinforces the stigmatised image of public housing and its tenants as problem-ridden, apathetic and incapable. An account of an exchange from the second of our panel meetings illustrates this dilemma. There was a discussion about effective 'fundraising', or rather 'support-raising', messages. A suggestion was made of a communications 'key message' along the lines of: 'Public housing tenants face a lot of problems and we should feel sorry for them because of that but--'. The suggestion was going to continue by emphasising that public housing tenants were not incapable and that there were many positive aspects to living in public housing, but it was stopped halfway through by an explosive collective interjection from several of the tenants present: 'No! We don't want people to feel sorry for us!'

The original suggestion had arisen from the widely-held belief that while people are motivated to support a cause by a complex mix of factors (Lindahl & Conley 2002), campaigns for support are most successful when the urgency of the problem is emphasised--that is, the intended recipient of the support needs help immediately and is unable to obtain it from other means and any delay in sending help would be damaging. Thus stereotypical, de-politicised messages that provoke guilt over any failure to respond are the most successful, while strengths-based campaigns that emphasise the resilience and capacity of the people needing assistance fare less well, because in the eyes of potential supporters the implicit message of the campaign is that they no longer need help. Whether or not these beliefs are accurate, they do dominate the communications and marketing strategies adopted by charitable and advocacy organisations at both the local and international level, which tend to stress dysfunction and helplessness (for housing-based examples, see Dean & Hastings 2002; Pleace & Quilgars 2003).

Much research in this area comes from the field of international development. According to Naylor (2011: 177), this literature has evolved substantially throughout the last 60 years but has retained as a constant 'the notion that there are certain actors with needs and that there are other actors with resources to meet to [sic] those needs'. Naylor contends that this construction essentially defines the policy and practical response to the problem. The exchange at the stigma panel demonstrates some of the problematic aspects of this construction.

Essentially, there is a fundamental contradiction between the messages that anti-stigma campaigners want to get out--that living in public housing is not a sign of moral failure and tenants make a positive contribution to society --and the type of messages that are needed to 'sell' anti-stigma campaigns --that tenants are subjected to unrelentingly negative media coverage, and therefore need external support to overcome this. Equally, messages that seek to counteract stigma by emphasising the strengths of public housing tenants carry with them an implicit reminder of the stereotypes which they seek to counter. This dilemma stymies attempts to tackle stigma by effectively placing campaigners 'between a rock and a hard place'.

Inertia

As previously stated, we argue that the most convincing explanatory frame for the problem of stigma is that it is a symptom of structural inequality, expressed in the main as locational disadvantage--that is, through the identifiable nature of the 'estates' which are viewed as embodying the tenure. Therefore, successfully challenging the causes of stigma would require substantial change to the status quo--a difficult task. The obstacles to this task include vested interests, both organised--for example, those lobby groups representing property developers, the housing industry and real estate agents, who have a vested interest on behalf of their members in sustaining the present system of housing wealth distribution in Australia--and unorganised. Both pose particular challenges.

The power of lobby groups arises in part from the nature of the modern policy process--policy is made out of the contestation of competing interest groups (Baumgartner & Leech 1998; Binderkrantz 2005). Commonly, these interests are divided by community activists into the binary of 'bad' corporate interests and 'good' community interests, although this over-simplifies the issue. For example, the notion of community interests always being 'good' is problematic because of competing agendas on the part of community residents and the community organisations who claim to speak for them but who also have a vested interest in obtaining government contracts, or by the conflicts within communities between different groups of residents.

In any event, contestation between different interest groups is ongoing--certain outcomes emerge when one group is in the ascendency and other outcomes arise when another group puts forward the strongest claim. The ideological inclinations of the government of the day are important, although they are, arguably, becoming less so with the homogenisation of ideology among Australia's two main political parties on economic and, increasingly, social matters (Goot 2004; Lavelle 2005). What is important about this characterisation of policy is that it makes clear the irrationality of the process. The development of policy does not follow a smooth progression from research to findings (evidence) to solution to proposal, but is a shifting process that reflects the results of a competition for who can put the best political case to government at a particular point in time (Fischer 2003). Yet it is difficult for community activists to grasp this because they, and indeed the wider community, are acculturated to think of the policy development process as one that responds rationally to 'evidence'. Therefore people assume that if they present the correct 'evidence' about their community, then the policy response will adjust appropriately (for an extended discussion of this argument, see Jacobs & Manzi 2013).

The term 'interests' is used to apply to formal or organised stakeholder groups, but it could also used to refer to 'unorganised' interests. The fact is that the majority of Australians (65 per cent) either own their homes outright or are purchasing them with a mortgage, and homeownership is an aspiration for many others. Only a small minority in the community (four per cent) are public housing tenants (Yates 2013), and thus, only a tiny minority of the community are directly affected by the stigma attached to public housing estates (Jacobs et al. 2013). A wider social change--to equalise the balance between public housing and other forms of tenure--would necessarily involve the majority giving up something to the minority. Of course, as policies to 'break up concentrations of disadvantage' are rolled out, public housing estates increasingly also contain private renters and home owners--but as Arthurson (2005) and others have shown (for example, Ruining et al. 2004), these private renters and home owners often cope with the stigma attached to the suburb as a whole by constructing themselves as separate from and superior to the public housing tenants, perpetuating the link between stigma and public housing by changing the scale at which it operates. Speaking even more broadly, given stigma's origins in wider socioeconomic conditions, dislodging the existing spread of wealth and income in the community would require challenging even more deeply-entrenched interests.

Conclusion

This paper has sought to make a contribution to the research on the impact of stigma on public housing by considering the factors that accentuate stigma and the practical challenges that arise when seeking to mitigate its effects. The principal methods of investigation were a literature review and the data collected from three panel discussions that included tenants, housing professionals, academics, policy officers and media experts. In this final section of the paper we set out some of the key policy issues that were drawn from the panel experience.

First, the problem of stigma has been accentuated by successive government policies that have reduced subsidies for public housing and embedded allocation targets that prioritise vulnerable and disadvantaged households. While there is a case for needs-based allocation of a finite and strained resource, our point is that such a policy has had consequences for the reputation and the viability of the public housing system, which has rebounded onto the lives of public housing tenants. It also produces flow-on policy changes--such as the introduction of fixed-term leases to support further targeting--that serve to residualise the system further. The dominant frames informing the general public's understanding of public housing reinforce the view that tenants are responsible for their predicament, that the self-evident deficiency of the tenant 'lifestyle' is the reason for hostility towards public housing and that the focus should be on service delivery responses that manage that deficiency. In short, the perception of public housing has been recast; it is no longer seen as a resource that can enable households to live free from poverty or even a stepping stone to homeownership but as a problematic tenure that accentuates welfare dependency.

Second, the most desirable outcome would be for governments to recognise the benefits of public housing as a long-term tenure and commit additional resources to fund an expansion that would permit a broader spectrum of households to access properties. However, new resources for public housing are not likely to be forthcoming, because of the acute pressure on welfare budgets in other areas of government spending, including education and health, and because of the dominance within policy circles of the pathological and managerial frames described above. This lack of substantial structural reform does not close off the possibility of addressing stigma through other interventions, but, as we have argued, there remain difficult dilemmas, which emerge even when all the participants around a table are committed to the same goal. For example, it is necessary to view stigma as a problem to generate discussion and make the case for extra resources but paradoxically, the identification of stigma as a problem can serve to reinforce negative stereotypes or patronise tenants. Advocacy groups seeking to secure more financial resources for public housing need to be vigilant to the unintended consequences of drawing attention to stigma and engage more closely with tenants' lived experience in designing strategies. The role of the media in reporting 'news', good or bad, about public housing communities is similarly fraught with the risk of unintended consequences, but a way must be found for the alternative framing of stories and news items in mainstream television, print and electronic media outlets to become common practice.

The experience of the panel discussions suggests that the identification of strategies to successfully tackle the stigma that applies to public housing and public housing communities is no more of a straightforward and cohesive process than that of public policy making. However, participation in discussions that interrogate the inequitable socio-economic structures and asymmetrical power relationships that feed the framing of stigma can illuminate these challenges in ways that shed light not just on the problem of stigma and how to counter it, but also on the inequity, asymmetry and differences of opinion that are in circulation. A disjuncture between 'professional' or 'academic' opinion and the lived experience of tenants is the most obvious of these.

Within the second explanatory frame identified above, the 'structural' frame, action to successfully counter stigmatisation--with its roots in long-term poverty, inequality and social exclusion, historic policy decisions that continue to weigh heavily in the present and a reactive media cycle driven by sensational headlines--would involve expensive systemic change, extensive government intervention and significant disruption to the existing social order. This is politically and socially unpalatable--and thus policy makers and campaigners have stepped back from engagement with the issues. In short, from within this frame, we argue that the status quo is politically and socially easier to endure for political elites than the consequences of action to change it. Stepping back has also meant the erosion of funding levels, which has reinforced and deepened stigmatisation.

The challenge of reforming longstanding attitudes towards public housing is, for these reasons, a formidable one, but in our view not insurmountable. In recent years, campaigners in equally contested and disparate social and economic contexts have been successful in challenging ill-informed views on a range of fronts including disability, homelessness and mental illness. The success of these campaigns should provide us with grounds for some optimism that progress is also achievable in addressing the stigmatisation of public housing.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Australian Housing and Research Institute for funding the research on which this paper is based and also to members of the research team for their contribution. We would also like to thank Gabrielle Meagher and the referees for their helpful suggestions on an earlier version of this paper.

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