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Housing policy in Belgium and Flanders is directed mainly towards encouraging home ownership. Social housing in Flanders covers a share of 5.6% of the housing stock. This social rental sector is characterized as a safety net by some housing researchers and as a general model by others. During the 1990s and the first half of this decade social housing in Flanders became under discussion. The image of social housing that dominated then was one of increasing problems with tenants and neighbourhoods. Raising the income limits to get a better social mix was advocated by the sector and afterwards by policy as one of the solutions for these problems, meanwhile also improving the revenues of the housing associations. The political discourse however was very little supported by scientific knowledge. This contribution aims at clarifying the position of the Flemish social housing by describing the historical and regulatory context and presenting the results of the Housing Survey 2005. It dispels the misunderstanding that Flemish social housing is a residual model and explores different future models. One of the conclusions is that solving problems of the social rental sector may not occur at the cost of those who need affordable housing most.

Belgium devolved administrative and budgetary responsibility for the favourable income tax treatment of owner-occupied dwellings to its administrative regions in July 2014. This change allowed the regions to redesign their housing-related tax instruments. This paper examines a tax policy reorientation of the Flemish Region according to the principles of the optimal tax theory based on the proposals of the British Mirrlees Review. These principles are used as a benchmark to determine whether owner-occupied housing is treated favourably via the tax system in Belgium. A brief comparison is also carried out with four other countries (Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom) in order to test for the use of these theoretical principles in other tax systems. Since none of the countries come close to optimal taxation and the Mirrlees Review is not uncontested, practice-based recommendations of international organisations are also taken into consideration. It has been determined that, recently, the Belgian tax system and more specifically Flemish homeownership taxation moved closer to what optimal taxation could be, but that this did not come about by explicitly considering the mechanisms of the tax system.

The autonomy of implementing agencies often seems to trigger reregulation of those agencies. Reregulation has two dimensions: the layering of different control mechanisms and the growth of the rules within those layers. Using a case study of social housing in Belgium, we explain the tendency to reregulate once autonomy is provided. We attribute the layering of rules to a conflict regarding oversight between the established legal profession and an ascending management profession. Crozier's vicious circle of bureaucratization helps to explain the growth of regulation within layers. The legal culture of the Rechtsstaat is a catalyst for both professional competition and bureaucratization.

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