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 paper argues that making affordable home mortgage loans available to a large cross section of the population will serve both the redistributive and growth-enhancing objectives of poverty reduction policies. The current state of housing and mortgage markets in selected Middle East and North...

The financial crisis showed, once again, that neglecting real estate booms can have disastrous consequences. In this paper, we spell out the circumstances under which a more active policy agenda on this front would be justified. Then, we offer tentative insights on the pros and cons as well as...

Some have suggested that housing policy, embodied by the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and affordable housing goals of the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), caused the subprime crisis. We examine if these programs led to worse mortgage outcomes using two approaches. The first examines...

We characterize Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) use in Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) units with the intent to explore whether the subsidy overlap responds to needs unmet by the HCV program alone. Lacking the data to contrast HCV use in and out of LIHTC units, we turn to a comparison of HCV...

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...