Long-term developments in housing policy and research

The nature of housing as a service (fulfilling basic needs) and a capital-intensive commodity (houses and the ‘underlying’ land have exchange value) hampers comparative understandings of ‘housing policy’, and its relation to social policy research. On the one hand, housing is a pillar of social policy, addressing social problems in the urban slums under early industrial capitalism (Fahey & Norris, 2011). Housing was provided mainly through unregulated private renting, characterized by the extraction of ‘super profits’. Following government regulation in the early years of the last century (rent control, quality standards) and in the post-war decades, the development of large-scale social housing programmes, as well as increasing affluence enabling homeownership, the private rental sector has shrunk more or less continuously over the course of time....