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Contemporary Challenges of Croatian Housing Policies in the Context of Post-Socialist Urban Development

Political and economic transformations of early 1990s in post-socialist countries of Europe had long-term impacts on housing policies and urban development, mostly through housing policy retrenchment and the dissolution of socialist urban planning. Reformed state and local institutional capacities in Croatia soon after 1990 became obsolete due to privatization, marketization and fiscal austerity measures implemented. Instead, actors of a newly formed private sector – mostly speculators and members of the new entrepreneurial class – acquired power in housing policy through lobbying and clientelist relationships with political elites during prolonged transition. For post-socialist countries, EU accession represented an unique chance in the 2000s when it came to general improvement of housing policy instruments by aligning them with EU development goals via Europeanization processes notwithstanding compliance with subsidiarity principle in the housing area. Concrete effects of Europeanization processes and mechanisms are yet to be seen in Croatian housing policy because of a rather late EU accession. Goal of this paper is to critically analyse main housing policy problems and challenges of Croatian cities in pre-crisis and post-crisis periods, with a special focus on prevalent quantitative and qualitative housing issues in the post-socialist urban development context.

urban development, housing policy, Croatia, post-socialism, EU.

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