The resilience of social rental housing in the United Kingdom, Sweden and Denmark. How institutions matter

Blackwell, Timothy; Bengtsson, Bo

doi:10.1080/02673037.2021.1879996

Cited by 25 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Target groups are mostly defined as households that are in some kind of "need," i.e. having problems accessing an appropriate dwelling (Blackwell and Bengtsson, 2021;Haffner et al, 2009). Existing literature identifies low-income households in particular as belonging to this group.…”

Section: Target Groupsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Rise and Fall of Social Housing? Housing Decommodification in Long-run Comparison

2022

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The comparative study of housing decommodification lags behind classical welfare state research, while housing research itself is rich in homeownership studies but lacks comparative accounts of private and social rentals due to missing comparative data. Building on existing works and various primary sources, this study presents a new collection of up to forty-eight countries’ social housing shares in stock and new construction since the first housing laws around 1900. The interpolated benchmark time series generally describes the rise and fall of social housing across a residual, a socialist, and a Northern-European housing group. The decline was steeper than for the classical welfare state, but the degree of erosion was surprisingly small in some countries where public housing associations remained resilient. Within the broader housing welfare state, social housing correlates positively with rent regulation and allowances, but negatively with homeownership subsidies and liberal mortgage regulation. A multivariate analysis shows that social housing is rather explained by housing shortages and complementarities with rental and welfare policies than by typical welfare state theories (GDP, political parties). Generally, the paper shows that conventional housing typologies are difficult to defend over time and argues more generally for including housing decommodification in welfare state research.

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Section: Target Groupsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Rise and Fall of Social Housing? Housing Decommodification in Long-run Comparison

2022

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“…the social housing sector in Denmark has been growing steadily over the entire period, the social housing sector in Sweden (and the UK) has been on a downward trend over the last three to four decades. 113 As argued by Blackwell and Bengtsson (2021), a social rental sector lacks resilience if it decreases too much in size (giving fewer citizens access to non-profit housing). Even though they argue that the absolute size of the social housing sectors in Denmark and Sweden is probably not an issue for major concern in terms of access, the trends might be.…”

Section: On Housing Policies In the Nordic Countriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While most of the Nordic countries 113. Blackwell and Bengtsson (2021) put forward a tentative explanation for the diverging trends in the three countries; the degree of political centralization in the provision and financing of social housing. They argue that the association-based, non-public, structure of social housing in Denmark with its multilevel system of financing has been more resistant to recent housing policies than the more centralized and publicly funded social housing in Sweden and the UK.…”

Section: On Housing Policies In the Nordic Countriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Over the last decades, there has been a discussion on how and to what extent different types of housing market policies (such as conversions via right-to-buy policies, sales to non-public landlords via privatization reforms, and the size and structure of new construction) have eroded the social housing sector in different countries (see, e.g.,Blackwell and Bengtsson 2021, and the references cited therein).Since this is related to the resilience of social housing, it is of both interest and importance to examine how the share of social housing evolves over time. In a comparison of the development of social rental dwellings in Denmark, Sweden and the UK from 1940 to 2015, Figure5inBlackwell and Bengtsson (2021; reproduced here as Figure1) reveals an interesting pattern.112 Even though the three countries have rather similar shares of social rental housing by the end of the period (around 17-21 percent), they have followed rather different trajectories to get there. While 112.…”

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Nordic Economic Policy Review 2021: Nordic Housing Markets and Policies

Anundsen¹,

Bergman²,

Bø³

et al. 2021

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I estimate fundamental house prices for Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden over the past 20 years. My results suggest that house prices were overvalued in all countries in the years preceding the global financial crisis, but that prices quickly returned to equilibrium following the ensuing housing market bust. Results suggest that house prices were undervalued in Denmark and Finland towards the end of 2019, and that they were overvalued in Norway and Sweden. Applying a separate test for bubbles, I only detect signs of a bubble in the Danish housing market in the period before the global financial crisis.

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“…These conversions represented an institutionalisation of the city speculators' modus operandi, and were soon extended to public housing. During the 1980s nearly 3% of the MHC stock was privatised (Blackwell and Bengtsson, 2021); a trend which, while little reported on at the time, would accelerate thenceforth.…”

Section: Speculation In the Citymentioning

confidence: 99%

Power, production and disorder: The decline of Sweden’s housing industrial complex and the origins of the present housing discontents

Blackwell

2021

European Urban and Regional Studies

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It is often assumed in housing and urban studies scholarship that the roots of Sweden’s present housing discontents are to be found in a neoliberal ‘system switch’ following the early-1990s banking crisis. This paper offers a different account, identifying and expounding how insuperable contradictions in Sweden’s complex of housing production, distribution and finance, from the 1970s onward, led to a marked deterioration in its much-lauded housing model. Advancing a historical institutionalist framework, the paper seeks to historically couch the processes and outcomes commonly associated with the contemporary neoliberal era and position them more concretely in relation to actors and their social relations through time. Using a range of data pertaining to housing finance, subsidies, house prices and building output, as part of a mixed-methods analysis, the paper explores how macroeconomic factors, mediated by interactions between the state and sectoral cleavages, influence urban and regional development aspects. The paper’s conceptual and methodological relevance to housing and urban studies scholarship thus extends beyond Sweden.

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The resilience of social rental housing in the United Kingdom, Sweden and Denmark. How institutions matter

Cited by 25 publications

References 33 publications

The Rise and Fall of Social Housing? Housing Decommodification in Long-run Comparison

The Rise and Fall of Social Housing? Housing Decommodification in Long-run Comparison

Nordic Economic Policy Review 2021: Nordic Housing Markets and Policies

Power, production and disorder: The decline of Sweden’s housing industrial complex and the origins of the present housing discontents

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