BIASES FORGED THROUGH SUSPICION: THE GATEKEEPER IN PUBLIC HOUSING RECONSIDERED

• Date: 28 April 2005
• Pages: 77-104
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1521-6136(04)06005-1
• Published date: 28 April 2005
• Author: Robert Garot

BIASES FORGED THROUGH

SUSPICION: THE GATEKEEPER IN

PUBLIC HOUSING RECONSIDERED

Robert Garot

ABSTRACT

This paper examines housing eligibility officers’ practices of suspicion,

which contribute to the systematic and historic appearance of bias in

their rationing of housing subsidies. Through developing expectations based

on racial/ethnic categorization, and perceiving anomalies in applicants’

documents, appearance, demeanor, and family obligations, housing officers

justify reasons for some applicants to receive a housing subsidy, and others

to be excluded. Housing officers judge each others’ competence based on

the use of such practices, and train novices in them, even as they reflexively

note that such practices may be discriminatory and are not to be found in

regulatory guidelines.

Deutscher’s (1968) classic study shows how a housing gatekeeper uses the

demeanor of applicants, family constellation, and the race of applicants for

determining their desirability for public housing. The use of such criteria would

seem to simply indicate the gatekeeper’s personal bias, based in the dominant

middle-class values of the time. As Lipsky (1980, p. 109) notes, “one of the most

well-grounded generalizations that can be made concerning client processing,”

is that “street-level bureaucrats respond to general orientations towards clients’

Ethnographies of Law and Social Control

Sociology of Crime, Law and Deviance, Volume6, 77–104

Copyright © 2005 by Elsevier Ltd.

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 1521-6136/doi:10.1016/S1521-6136(04)06005-1

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78 ROBERT GAROT

worthiness or unworthiness that permeate society and to whose proliferation

they regularly contribute.” This study also finds that housing gatekeepers use

such criteria in rationing housing to applicants, yet the reasoning behind such

orientations differs dramatically in this study, as it is not merely the result of

personal bias. Rather, such discriminatory actions are the result of carefully

cultivated practices of suspicion, by which gatekeepers judge their colleagues’

competence and train novices.

Workers’ noticings which elicit suspicion have been an enduring topic in

sociological research. Sacks (1972), for example, wrote of how police officers

suspect persons who appear to deviate from the policeman’s conception of

the “normal ecology” of an area. Whalen and Zimmerman (1990) explore

how emergency calls to the police may elicit suspicion from the call-taker if

the caller’s stance (their account of their ability to see and hear) towards an

event appears to the call-taker to insufficiently warrant the caller’s depictions

of the trouble. Furthermore, Emerson (1997) shows how interviewers who are

usually not suspicious of women applying for temporary restraining orders may

become suspicious of a client’s motivations if a third party supporter becomes

overzealous in their advocacy for the client. Each of these studies probes the

grounds for how workers respond to clients suspiciously “with good reason.”

In the Ferndale (pseudonym) Section 8 Housing Program, these grounds rest

in perceiving deviations from: routine paperwork, applicants’ appearance and

demeanor, assumptions regarding family obligations, and applicants’ perceived

racial/ethnic categorization.

According to federal regulations, Section 8 tenants must meet certain eligibility

guidelines, verified with proper documentation, as discussed below. A Section

8 worker who makes decisions based merely on such criteria, however, would

be considered dubious, or at least a dupe of savvy applicants. Knowing when

to become suspicious, and how to act based on suspicion, are central skills by

which many social control and human service workers judge the competence of

their fellow workers. To not be suspicious when an experienced worker would

find suspicion warranted is to be either inexperienced or incompetent. Such a

worker wastes precious resources and is an embarrassment to colleagues, as

they allow criminal activity to escape attention, or allow wealthy applicants to

receive government subsidies. Regulations, however, are hopelessly inadequate

for specifying the details of such work. For example, when police officers suspect

those who deviate from the “normal ecology” of an area (Bittner,1967; Rubinstein,

1973; Sacks, 1972), they must know what is “normal” (see Sudnow, 1965) in

their ecology, and what might deviate from it, which are processes requiring

years of watching an area and developing relationships with members. Similarly,

many housing eligibility officers take pride in their ability to question applicants