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

Abstract

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.

House price cycles, housing systems, and growth models

“…Similar developments took place one or two decades before in Iceland and Ireland (Bohle 2018) as well as the US and UK (Ryan-Collins 2021; Reisenbichler/Wiedemann 2022). By contrast, most core European and some Nordic countries exhibit low homeownership rates and less volatile housing cycles, partly due to a greater role for social housing (Kholodilin et al 2022).…”

Taming the real estate boom in the EU: Pathways to macroprudential (in)action

“…A final aspect is the question of the salience of homeownership and its importance, where broader policy debates come into play, such as the taxation and subsidization of homeownership (Lepers, 2021), the development of functioning rental markets, and the expansion of social housing programs (Kholodilin et al, 2022), the latter two providing alternatives to private homeownership. Bohle and Seabrooke (2020, p. 413) point in this respect to “the subordination of housing policies to questions of financial market profitability and stability” which have “left unanswered the question of how to provide affordable housing independently of financial markets” with few governments having chosen decisive action on these latter fronts post‐financial crisis.…”

“…4 4 Being largely the outcome of path‐dependent processes over centuries (Kholodilin et al, 2022; Kohl, 2018b), the set‐up of the financing of real estate loans as well as their stratification effects were shown to be important to political dynamics surrounding housing (Ansell, 2019). …”

Housing affordability and poverty in Europe: on the deteriorating position of market renters

“…First, this distinction leads to splits between rental types that do not graft unproblematically onto national estimates of social housing tenures (in relation to Ireland, see Kelly et al, 2021). Second, in countries with significant state intervention into rental markets to reduce costs, where Kemeny's 'unitary' rental system might be said to be in operation, all rented accommodation is categorised as being paid at the 'prevailing or market' rent (our emphasis; see also Kholodilin et al, 2022 on the challenges of comparing definitions of 'social housing' in international terms). This affects Sweden and the Netherlands (and we re-classify rented accommodation in these countries as being at a reduced rate).…”

“…More broadly, this paper represents a contribution towards the greater integration between Housing Studies and Social Policy of late (e.g. Dewilde & Haffner, 2022;Hick & Stephens, 2023;Kholodilin et al, 2022), after a period where debates had at times become rather specialised and siloed.…”