Order amidst chaos: recognising patterns in the geography of out of area housing

One aspect of the UK housing crisis is the high number of households living in temporary accommodation. This paper looks at temporary accommodation households placed ‘out of area’ into other local authority areas. Whilst this may appear to be a chaotic picture of households being moved in an expedient manner to wherever there is a space, using freedom of information request data, it is possible to identify patterns in these journeys, which can be defined as linear, reciprocal and stellate. Linear describes a general movement of households in a line through various local authorities, starting with a net placer and ending with a net receiver. A reciprocal pattern is whereby two or three local authorities are, in effect, exchanging comparable numbers of households, whilst a stellate pattern is where one local authority is a hub that is placing households into a variety of neighbouring local authorities. The paper further argues that the nature of out of area housing illustrates the increasingly important yet persistently overlooked nature of what we call ‘local-local relationality’.