The Dog that didn’t Bark: Social Housing in European Peripheries

The global financial crisis has ushered in a major housing crisis in many European countries: severe shortage of affordable housing, high rates of housing deprivation especially in Europe’s East, overindebted homeowners, massive evictions in some Southern European countries, and increase in homelessness are the symptoms of the re-emergence of the “housing question” (Engels 1872). To a large extent, the current housing crisis reveals the failure of past policies, which saw the solution to affordable housing in privatization of housing, securitization of mortgages and “financial inclusion” of poorer people via the relaxation of borrowing standards, and subsidization of “subprime” lending. Given the extent of the housing crisis, there is scantly a clearer time to expect social housing to be high on the political agenda. However, in many cases the housing policy response to the crisis in Europe tended to reflect pre-crisis policy ideas and recipes, rather than shifts towards an increased emphasis on social housing.