Ethnicity, racism and housing: discourse analysis of New Zealand housing research

Within the last decade, the notion of a housing crisis emerged as a key issue on national political agendas across nation-states. The overall decline in homeownership is even sharper along racial lines. The way race/ethnicity is captured in housing research has important implications for how racial disparities are explained and addressed. This paper uses a critical discourse analysis to examine how ethnicity and race are represented in New Zealand housing research published between 2013 and 2019. The analysis reveals a lack of attention devoted to explaining racial disparities in housing research. Only one article from a sample of 103 referenced the concepts 'racism' and 'institutional racism' to explain institutional barriers that adversely affect Indigenous people engaging with home-lending institutions. This paper argues that housing scholarship is an important space for understanding how policies institutionalize racism to exclude marginalized bodies, especially through predatory lending practices, loan denial, and segregation. This paper concludes with a discussion of the social implications of race-neutral explanations of housing-related issues.