engleski

Urban Housing Systems in Times of Crisis

This paper is a part of FP7 EU project WILCO- Welfare innovations at the local level in favour of cohesion. The empirical research in this project has been carried out in 2011 in twenty European cities from 10 European countries and from welfare regimes. We analysed housing, child care and unemployment in the context of social conditions of: the young with a position on the labour market, single mothers with children and first generation migrants. Paper analysis housing in the context of local welfare considering its three facts: its capital function, its consumer function and its social investment and welfare function. Each of these functions can have an impact at various levels. From analysis it is clear that Harloe’s thesis of convergence goes a long way in explaining developments in housing as a capital market, with rising shares of ownership and a shrinking social sector ; yet the distributional effects of this development and the possibilities for local authorities to respond to them are to a large extent conditioned by the institutional configurations captured by the welfare regimes. Cities within the different welfare regimes show different approaches to welfare. However, privatisations and austerity measures have stopped new investment in social housing. Comparative data show that the demand for affordable housing is not producing a higher supply. The economic crisis and the increase of unemployment contribute to these structural housing problems of young people. From the analysed data, it is evident that welfare regimes affect the extent to which the effects of the crisis are cushioned. Predictably, the social-democratic and to a lesser extent the corporatist regimes provide the largest measure of security for young people. The empirical evidence suggests that older people, lone parents, families with disabled persons, victims of domestic violence, singles and students are all affected by the current crisis, but in different ways. Again, in cities with a relatively high supply of social housing and a large presence of the third sector, there have been more initiatives to address the needs of members of these groups. Outcomes of this research suggest that there is a need to focus on social innovation and policy learning, utilizing the links of housing to other fields of welfare more systematically. This requires less emphasis on financial investment and more on housing as a social investment.

housing, local welfare systems, social vulnerability, housing affordability

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