Private rented housing in France

This paper reviews the evolution of the French private rented housing sector. It traces post-war policy developments, putting the specific tenure in a wide housing market context. The paper reviews France’s intricate system of personal and property—oriented housing subsidies, and assesses their demand and supply side repercussions. Discussion of the general post-war decline in private rented housing as a means of housing consumption is situated in the evolution of the national housing system, and the paper alludes to some key regional and local differentiations. The paper discusses the market contexts for attempts to revitalise the sector, concluding that broad fiscal measures are likely to have greater impact than rent decontrol. Madhu Satsangi is Lecturer in Housing Studies at the School of Planning and Housing, Edinburgh College of Art/Heriot-Watt University. Madhu has researched housing markets, voluntary and private-sector housing finance and housing management issues.     

Housing segregation and the poor: New trends in French social rented housing

Traditionally, French social housing was housing low‐paid workers with a regular job. The very poor were in private dilapidated housing. Today a new pattern is emerging: the very poor and the deprived are in the most dilapidated fraction of social housing. Far from improving their social integration, dilapidated social housing estates are stigmatizing them. Social tenants are still second‐class citizens.     

Pricing and subsidy systems in British social rented housing: Assessing the policy options

In common with other similar countries Britain has displayed a tendency to shift from investment based housing subsidies to income related forms of assistance. However, despite two attempts at reform since 1970 a durable, effective and equitable system of pricing and subsidy has yet to be devised Further legislation is in prospect and this paper reviews the issues and principles confronting policy makers, before turning to a discussion of three policy options, chosen to illustrate different general approaches to pricing and subsidy. The options considered are capital value rents, national rent pooling and consumption expenditure pricing.     

Good dwellings for all: The case of social rented housing in Sweden

During the last decade many European countries have experienced a decline in the production of social rented housing, and there has also been an increase in sales of such dwellings. However, in Sweden social rented housing is still treated as an integral part of Social Democratic housing policy. According to this policy it should not be regarded as a residual tenure only to people in special need of housing. On the contrary, the official goal is to make it as efficient as other tenures in providing good dwellings for all. In order to popularise this tenure a number of measures have been introduced during the 1980s, such as diversification of the stock, decentralisation of management, increasing tenants’ influence and ambitious renewal programmes. Sales of municipal housing have been kept at a low level, although more sophisticated forms of privatisation have been observable. This paper reviews recent tendencies in social rented housing in Sweden, ending up with a discussion of its political basis and prospects.     

Risks and principles: The management of housing with support in the social rented sector in Scotland

Social housing plays a key role in the provision of support to disabled people but to what extent can care in the community principles be upheld in the context of the financial constraints in the provision of supported housing? This paper draws on findings from an evaluation of Scottish Home’s care in the community policy, to establish the considerable consensus of opinion on the principles underlying the housing contribution to community care and the increasing concerns of providers on the complexity and instability of the funding mechanisms for supported housing. To illustrate the discrepancy between the word and the deed in housing management practice, evidence is examined from recent studies on the use of housing agreements and tenancy rights in supported accommodation in Scotland. The paper identifies the gap between the expressed aims and intentions of providers and managers towards the occupants of supported housing and housing management practice and contends that financial pressures are a key element in producing this gap. If community care policies are to be successful, appropriate funding mechanisms and housing management practice are crucial.     

Commercial rented housing: two sectors in the Netherlands

This contribution analyses the different developments and roles of two commercial rented sectors in the Netherlands: rented dwellings owned by individuals (private landlords) and rented dwellings owned by institutional investors. Characteristics of properties and households are specified in relation to tenure. An analysis follows of household characteristics of non-movers and movers to, from and within the commercial rented sector. Some policy issues are dealt with, which are relevant for the commercial rented sector. The commercial rented dwellings owned by persons are predominantly pre-war, small, cheap dwellings with a modest quality. They form part of the urban renewal problem. The owners are small-scale landlords, mostly not professional, who do not invest in ambitious renovation or new dwellings. For this sector the future is not very bright. For starters on the housing market and elderly people, this urban sector may have a limited function. The commercial rented dwellings owned by institutions are predominantly post-war (built after 1960), spacious, expensive dwellings with a high quality. The owners are pension funds and insurance companies which sell their properties often after 15 to 20 years when conditions are favourable. This sector has a strategic function at the upper side of the rental market where rents are decontrolled. Well-to-do households in a flexible urban labour market and elderly people are the most important target groups for this sector. This sector demonstrates how a free rental market functions and enriches the whole housing sector with relevant market signals. Hugo Priemus holds the chair in housing at Delft University of Technology, where he is also managing director of OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies.     

International comparison of social housing management in Western Europe

This article provides an overview of social housing management in seven West-European countries. In order to place the concept of housing management in context and allow comparison, housing management is classified according to technical, social and financial aspects of management. Housing management has become increasingly independent and the financial ties are becoming looser in nearly all of the seven investigated countries. Even though governments still play a major role in Europe with respect to the granting of subsidies, the non-profit institutions have to entirely rely on the capital market in order to obtain the required funds. However, in many cases intermediary organisations are still responsible for attracting loans. Peter Boelhouwer is a senior research at the OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies, Delft University of Technology. His research focus has been on general housing policy, housing finance and comparative housing research. This paper is based on two recent OTB-studies about the social rented sector in Western Europe. The first study was written by Birgitta van de Ven and was published in 1995 in the Dutch series “Volkshuisvestingsbeleid en Bouwmarkt” (26). The title of this report is “Housing systems in Europe: A comparative study of housing management”. The second study (Boelhouwer, 1996) is titled “Financing the social rented sector in Western Europe”, and is published in the series Housing and Urban Policy Studies. This project was carried out by the OTB in cooperation with the School of the Built Environment of the De Montfort University in Leicester (UK). This cooperation forms part of the Centre for Comparative Housing Research.     

Promoting home ownership in a social‐rented city: policies,practices and pitfalls

Amsterdam's housing market is dominated by the social‐rented sector. It comprises 56 per cent of the total housing stock, while home ownership comprises only 19 per cent, lower than anywhere else in the Netherlands, and among the lowest in the world. Central government policy is currently seeking to increase the share of home ownership in the Netherlands from 53 per cent (2001) to 65 per cent in 2010. This paper will summarise recent national and local (Amsterdam) housing policy developments, focusing on the recent practice of selling social housing in Amsterdam. Unlike the Right to Buy scheme in Britain, the Netherlands employs an ‘offer to buy’ strategy. Sales, however, have been disappointing so far. Two factors were found to be crucial in this regard: (1) the sluggish change in ‘policy mentality’ and bureaucracy and (2) the high prices in the home ownership market. By way of conclusion, the paper reflects on the desirability of shifting the tenure structure from tenancy to ownership and on the risks that an (over‐) emphasis on home ownership may bring.     

The geographic distribution of social housing in Ontario,Canada: Comparing public housing and locally sponsored,third sector housing

This paper provides a perspective on the contemporary debate over the production of social housing. Its main focus is on the issue that geographic patterns of service levels may be related to the type of supply program in place. The paper describes the social housing programs in Ontario, Canada over the post‐war period. Two main approaches have been taken: public housing, an essentially centralized program; and locally sponsored, third sector housing provided through non‐profit corporations and co‐operatives. The programs operated in different time periods and the analysis suggests they do have distinctive geographic distributions. The distribution of public housing shows strong correlations with need as defined by the incidence of poor housing conditions and mother‐led families. Provision under the localized program is also strongly correlated with the incidence of mother‐led families; however, the most consistent associations are with measures of socio‐economic status. These results may be partly understood in terms of the changing concept of housing need over the temporal span of the study. Program influences may be that the centralized nature of the public housing program enabled the direction of allocations to high need areas; whereas under the localized program the distribution is more closely related to the social differentiation of leadership roles in service provision under a third sector delivery model. As this approach becomes more prevalent it may be important to examine its potential impacts on service provision.     

Social housing allocation,choice and neighbourhood ethnic mix in England

Driven by a concern about the negative side effects of ethnic concentration neighbourhoods, many European governments aim to create more ethnically and socio-economically mixed neighbourhoods. At the same time, housing policy aims to give tenants more choice in how and where they live. The objectives of these two policies might conflict as offering people choice has the potential to increase self-segregation, especially across ethnic groups. This paper studies the effect of choice-based letting on (self) segregation in housing association stock in England. We analyse whether households who let their property under choice-based letting end up in neighbourhoods with different levels of ethnic concentrations than households who are matched to a dwelling using the traditional allocation system. We focus on how the effect of choice-based letting differs for ethnic minority households and non-ethnic minority households. Using unique data on all lettings made in the housing association sector in England in 2006/2007 and an ordered logit regression model we show that ethnic minority households are more likely to let a property in an ethnic concentration neighbourhood than non-ethnic minority households. Ethnic minorities letting their property under choice-based letting are the most likely to accept a dwelling in an ethnic concentration neighbourhood.     

Race and the allocation of public housing: Changing perspectives,recurrent themes

Housing on Trial. By Elizabeth Burney. Oxford University Press (for Institute of Race Relations). 1967.

What Price Equality? Deborah Phillips, Greater London Council 1986.

Race, Class and the Allocation of State Housing. By Jeff Henderson and Valerie Kam. Aldershot: Gower. 1987.

Race and Housing: New Perspectives. edited by Susan Smith and John Mercer, University of Glasgow, Centre for Housing Research. 1987.     

Economic governance and social values: The case of a major housing project 1

The article discusses the tension between the demands imposed by economic forms of social co‐ordination, on the one hand, and the plurality of values underlying contemporary societies, on the other. The recent expansion of economic modes of governance throughout the entire fabric of social life posits a series of central social and political problems as it seeks to redefine important social values and functional domains that evade the monoethical horizon of utility and the logic of efficiency. Drawing on Luhmann's notion of the functional primacy of economy, the article attempts to understand the interaction forms of the contemporary society's highly differentiated functional domains and suggest a reasonable response to the problems associated with the expansion of economic modes of governance and co‐ordination. The theoretical ideas are then recast in the form of a case study in housing that reveals the planning and construction of houses as a complex cross‐functional context whose outcome is defined by the complex interaction of three major systems or institutional forces that are referred to as the games of beauty‐functionality, justice and scarcity.

We can have words without a world but no world without words or other symbols. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaldng     

National,regional and local patterns in the residualisation of the social rented tenure: the case of ireland and dublin

To date, research on the socio-economic characteristics of the social renting population in the Republic of Ireland has focused on the national level and has found that in common with many other Western European countries the years since the mid-1980s have seen an increased concentration of low income and socially excluded households in this tenure. Drawing on data on the incomes and socio-demographic status of the households who rent their dwellings from Ireland's largest social landlord, Dublin City Council, this paper explores the impact of this macro-process of residualisation on tenants in this region, and also on different localities within it. It demonstrates that residualisation has resulted in higher concentrations of poor households in social rented accommodation in Dublin compared to the general social renting population of the country and at the micro-level has impacted differently on different districts of the city and contemplates the factors which have contributed to this uneven pattern of residualisation.