Governing Through Locational Choice: the Locational Preferences of Rural Public Housing Tenants in South-Western New South Wales, Australia

The state provision of housing assistance often fulfils goals in addition to that of providing citizens with affordable shelter. With a broad shift to advanced liberal governmental strategies, both housing and regional development policies construct governmental strategies that promote locationally flexible responses as appropriate means of adjustment to regional change and locational disadvantage. Using a survey and interviews conducted with public housing tenants from four towns in south-western rural New South Wales, this paper builds on the governmentality literature in housing studies that has emerged over the last five years and explores the potential locational preferences of housing assistance recipients. In particular it investigates whether rural public housing tenants were likely to become more mobile/locationally flexible with greater locational choice and to analyse how "economically rational" these locational preferences would be. The paper finds that while a majority of tenants indicated a preparedness to become locationally flexible, these preferences were not influenced predominantly by economically rational factors. Likewise, at a regional scale, a majority of tenants indicated a preference for rural areas, with their discourses exhibiting country-minded attitudes and a strong attachment to place. The paper concludes with the reflection that the use of "choice" as a technology of government is unlikely to produce the economically rational, locationally flexible responses that policymakers pursue as a means of addressing regional disadvantage. Instead, such governmental processes are likely to be hindered by other non-economic factors that remain as strong influences in how individuals come to their locational preferences.