5 - Housing and politics

Summary

Over the preceding two chapters, we have seen that housing policies and institutions meaningfully affect both national economic stability and distributional outcomes. These consequences, moreover, are linked: as economies become more volatile, the most precariously housed are more vulnerable to being forced into insecure situations – especially in financialized and commodified systems. Given these links between housing and important real-world outcomes, it would be strange if housing policy did not figure into national political debates. The goal of this chapter is therefore to assess how housing needs and outcomes influence political coalitions and debates across Europe.

This starts with identifying the policies of the key players. To do this, I have examined the housing policies of 67 major political parties across a dozen EU countries – including at least two countries from each of the descriptive categories identified in Chapter 2. The goal of this process was to distinguish between political parties’ broad approaches to housing policy. Despite enormous variation in specific policy prescriptions, most parties choose from the following stances – though some are not mutually exclusive:

• 1. Generally ignoring the housing issue altogether;

• 2. Promoting homeownership through mortgage support and targeted subsidies to buyers (which we will refer to as “demandside measures”);

• 3. Increasing the amount of housing available to the market – such as through state- provided housing, including the appropriation of unused property (these will be considered “supply- side measures”);

• 4. Enhancing protections for private and social tenants;

• 5. Prioritizing “insider” access to housing (e.g., explicit attempts to bar migrants from housing).

Based on what we have learned so far, we can anticipate some patterns in the sort of policies that parties adopt. First, we would expect housing policies – whether demand-side, supply-side or tenancy-related – to feature more prominently in the party programmes of more financialized and commodified housing systems. This is because the volatility and related precarity promoted by such housing systems create larger gaps between winners and losers. On a political level, there is simply less to fight over where housing is already widely distributed or secure access to housing (even if rented) has long been guaranteed.