English: Despite a long period of public management reform in social housing, including shifts from state to non-profit providers and exit opportunities for tenants, access to new tenancies has until very recently continued to be mediated by bureaucratic rationing approaches. This article explores the reasons for the long dominance of rationing, and the factors that are now leading to its replacement with more consumerist approaches known as ‘choice-based lettings’. Chaos and complexity theory are used to explore the role of market factors and changes in understanding in destabilising an entrenched initial attractor pattern, and the role of local experiment, policy transfer and new political agendas in establishing a new attractor pattern.