Social Housing in Europe

Kathleen Scanlon, Christine Whitehead, Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia, Kathleen Scanlon, Christine Whitehead, Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781118412343
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781118412381
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Real Estate
• Index: Business

All countries aim to improve housing conditions for their citizens but many have been forced by the financial crisis to reduce government expenditure.  Social housing is at the crux of this tension.  Policy-makers, practitioners and academics want to know how other systems work and are looking for something written in clear English, where there is a depth of understanding of the literature in other languages and direct contributions from country experts across the continent.

Social Housing in Europe combines a comparative overview of European social housing written by scholars with in-depth chapters written by international housing experts. The countries covered include Austria, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, The Netherlands and Sweden, with a further chapter devoted to CEE countries other than Hungary. 

The book provides an up-to-date international comparison of social housing policy and practice.  It offers an analysis of how the social housing system currently works in each country, supported by relevant statistics.  It identifies European trends in the sector, and opportunities for innovation and improvement.

These country-specific chapters are accompanied by topical thematic chapters dealing with subjects such as the role of social housing in urban regeneration, the privatisation of social housing, financing models, and the impact of European Union state aid regulations on the definitions and financing of social housing.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Kathleen Scanlon, Christine Whitehead and Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia

LSE London, London School of Economics, UK

This Habitation à Loyer Modéré (HLM) tower in Les Presles in the Parisian outskirts of Épinay-sur-Seine is one of the many (47%) social-housing buildings in the quarter. The area is also part of the French ‘Sensitive Urban Development Zones’, or ZUS (see Chapter 8 in this book).

Photograph: Nicolas Oran.

For much of the post-war period, the model of social housing was broadly similar across Northern and Eastern Europe: there was a heavy emphasis on state-supported housing construction to overcome the effects of extreme destruction and lack of investment during the war, to accommodate rapidly growing populations, to help bring economies back to some sort of normality and to ensure employment.

The mechanisms for achieving this expansion in housing investment differed between countries. In most of them, local authorities (hereafter referred to as LAs) were heavily involved, either building municipal housing themselves or creating the conditions for independent social landlords to do so. However, the forms of central-government subsidy and intervention were specific to each country, and helped mould longer term approaches to ensuring ‘a decent home for every household at a price they could afford’.

The extent to which housing was seen as part of the welfare state – and thus part of the contract between citizens and government – also varied. In Eastern Europe, social housing was very much based on state provision of the social wage and in most of Northern Europe, it was seen as an important part of the welfare-state contract, but in Southern Europe, the policy emphasis was more on supporting family provision of housing – and this meant owner occupation.

Among what might be called the welfare-state economies, the most important distinction was between countries that saw social housing as a mechanism for providing for all types of household, and those that emphasised provision for lower income households. As numerical housing shortages began to be overcome, this distinction became more embedded, and was further strengthened by the increasing emphasis on privatisation and private finance during the 1980s and 1990s.

By the new century, there was a clear distinction between countries whose governments wanted to withdraw from housing provision (as opposed to support) and those that continued to see an important mainstream role for social housing, particularly in urban renewal. Eastern European countries were in the forefront of withdrawal – and often did so without putting in place other mechanisms for supporting lower income and vulnerable households. At the other extreme was the Netherlands, where social housing providers became increasingly strong in financial terms and took on more and more urban investment opportunities.

It was in this context that in 2006, a group of French researchers, supported by some French government funding through the GIS Réseau Socio-Économie de l'Habitat, brought together interested academics from across Europe to gather statistical and qualitative evidence on how social housing was developing across the continent. The patterns observed suggested that there were many similarities across countries – notably with respect to who lived in the sector, how it ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series pages
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Section One: Social Housing in 12 European Countries
• Section Two: Cross-Cutting Themes
• Glossary
• Index
• End User License Agreement