Housing policy in the emergent socialist mixed economy of Eastern Europe

The late 1980s signal a qualitatively new stage in the development of socialist economies. Earlier reforms attempted to move away from a monolithic, centrally planned system, to find more effective mechanisms of economic management, in particular to reduce the role of planning and increase the role of the market within the statist economy. But during the last two or three years a significant change has occurred in the reform discourse. The debate over ‘how much plan and how much market’ has come to be replaced by a call for a reform of ownership (Bauer, 1988). A ‘socialist mixed economy’, with a statist sector complemented by a private sector seems to be in the making.

This paper has two aims.

In the first part I present the trend towards a socialist mixed economy. I will explain the forces pointing in this direction, the likely functioning of a socialist mixed economy, and finally, how different a socialist mixed economy might be from a capitalist one.

In the second part I look at the housing economy, and explore how housing policy may change as the national economy becomes increasingly mixed. Re‐privatisation of housing preceded re‐privatisation or deregulation in other sectors. From the late 1960s onwards the state began to withdraw from housing construction in many countries (Ciechocinska, 1988; Daniel and Temesi, 1984; Tosics, 1987). By the late 1980s a significant proportion of new housing was built which was the individual property of the occupants. Is the housing system therefore already a mixed economy? In my view, the answer to this question is no. The main purpose of the second section of my paper is to show that this ‘re‐privatisation’ or ‘marketisation’ of the housing economy has been highly restricted. As far as the system of production is concerned there has been no private (profit orientated) sector in the housing economy; market‐like forces only regulated the distribution of housing. The task of this paper is to show that the transformation of the national economy into a socialist mixed economy is therefore likely to have far‐reaching consequences for the housing system. I will also try to show, in some detail, what these consequences are likely to be.