From doors to scores: The financialization and algorithmization of discrimination in the private rented sector

This paper examines the political-economy of private rented sector discrimination. Focusing on discrimination against welfare-recipients in the United Kingdom, it demonstrates how the explicit, quantitative and centralized features of algorithmic discrimination align with the abstract logics of large-scale global investors in the private rented sector, thus implying a symbiotic relationship between financialization and algorithmization. However, these same features also render algorithmic discrimination vulnerable to legal and political challenge. This is particularly true of simple and stable ‘pre-digital’ forms of algorithmic discrimination, such as blanket bans against welfare-recipients, which legibly discriminate against meaningful social categories. It is much less true of ‘digital’ forms of algorithmic discrimination, such as Tenant Acceptability Scores, which are more difficult to politicize because they are complex, dynamic and produce individual synthetic scores that bear an illegible relationship to socially meaningful categories. Due to this combination of financial-organizational and political-legal factors, we therefore speculate that future discrimination in the private rented sector will involve a combination of digital algorithmic discrimination and traditional judgemental discrimination.