This text deals with the topic of housing shortage vs. residential vacancy – housing market intervention as a task of politics? At the beginning there will be some basic assertions on the relation of market vs. state, especially bearing in mind, the overall importance and social responsibility...

There are four major challenges for housing policy in the near and midterm future: First, rents in many German conurbations have been rising significantly faster than incomes over the last five years. Though it can rightly be argued, that the suggested policies of the new German federal...

The regional differences in the housing markets are enormous and will continue to exacerbate in the future. The main task for the housing policy is to take appropriate long term measures depending on the market structure. A central aspect of future housing policy is the site development....

This article examines the housing policy implemented by the Basque Government, in accordance with the exclusive authority devolved to it in this matter under the regional Statute of Autonomy. In this sense, the article first describes the various organisational instruments developed over time to...

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...

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...

This paper explores the impact of housing reforms on public rented housing in Eastern Europe, using Latvia and Ukraine as case studies. The focus on public housing is important, since in both countries municipalities and state institutions are the major social landlords. Rent structures are not...

In this chapter we investigate the process of ethnic minority segregation in English social housing. Successive governments have expressed a commitment to the contradictory aims of providing greater choice – through the introduction of choice based letting – for households accessing an...

The trajectory of the Spanish housing policy has shaped the current housing system and it shows its non-neutrality in its effects on tenure or on the redistribution of wealth. In Spain, the usual scheme of housing intervention is far from those policies implemented by its European neighbours,...

Before the 2009 crisis, the change in the economic environment in policies support housing sector and regulations implemented by the federal government in the years following, significantly changed the environment in which construction companies were operating housing, which directly affected...