The 'right to housing' in France implies that disadvantaged people suffering poverty or housing difficulty enjoy priority access to social housing. However, the disadvantaged in fact have serious difficulty obtaining access to social housing in France. In this article, insider-outsider theory...

This introduction to the special issue on 'market concepts, coordination mechanisms and new actors in social housing' makes the case for multi-disciplinary and multi-level studies of the impacts of market-oriented policies aimed at social housing. The authors suggest that privatisation, tenant...

In the Dutch social housing sector, after almost 20 years of allocating dwellings with choice-based letting (CBL), there is a growing need to adapt the allocation systems currently in use. The policy debate on improvements in housing allocation centres around three main themes. First, many...

Over recent years, residential segregation of the two main religious communities in Northern Ireland has become the focus of much government and media attention both locally and internationally. Whilst residential segregation locally ignores tenure boundaries, research has established it to be...

This paper seeks to inject a new dimension into comparative housing research by exploring policy transfer in the case of choice-based lettings (CBL). Conceived in the Netherlands around 1990, CBL has attracted widespread interest in other developed countries as a 'consumerist' quasi-market...

Social housing allocation systems have often been identified as contributing to the socio-economic polarization of neighbourhoods. Part of this argument has rested on a contention that - notwithstanding the impartial operation of 'needs-based' approaches - there is an inevitable tendency for the...

In an attempt to promote efficiency and consumer choice, many governments in Europe have in recent years required social housing organisations to be more market-orientated and competitive. Competition, however, is being discussed and implemented without any detailed examination of what is meant...

The article provides the comparison of state housing policies in six selected Central and Eastern European countries. The description of the basic elements of policy approaches is followed by an analysis of both the efficiency and effectiveness of new supply- and demand-side subsidies. For this...

By 2008, ownership transfers of former council housing had been proceeding for 20 years. Since 1997, the process has encompassed many larger urban local authorities, with housing departments which could have been fairly characterised as monolithic, producer-oriented bureaucracies. Drawing on new...

Social rental housing stands in marked contrast to other social policy areas in Ireland in that it was initiated early in comparison to other European countries, was both financed and managed by the state and up until recently had only a marginal input from the non-profit sector. Although now...