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At the beginning of the 1980s, French local public administrations that were involved in what was to become a national urban renewal program started to produce racial categorisations to identify and control the social composition in specific public housing estates. Based on two socio-historical investigations conducted in the Paris region, this paper uses archives of various nature as well as interviews with former local stakeholders to study how these categorisations came to be. Focusing on the processes that come before potential discrimination in housing access, the paper shows that city employees and managers of social housing public companies played an often neglected role in the construction of a racial common sense, which allowed for the classification of tenants on the basis of essentialized origins. Despite contextual variations in categorisation processes, both cases show the establishment of a classification system that racializes and hierarchizes the inhabitants of public housing estates.