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....

A number of international jurisdictions have articulated a longer term goal of zero emission housing standards. However, in Australia, housing energy efficiency remains a contested policy area. In part, this is due to a lack of clear cost-benefit information on low emission housing standards,...

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...

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...

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...

We study the distributive effects on Italian households of the three most relevant housing subsidies targeted to renters: a national rent supplement scheme introduced in the context of the reform that liberalised the rental market in the late 1990s, a tax credit for renters that has been...