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This paper argues that financialisation exacerbates gender inequity in the United States. During the Recession, wealth-stripping activities targeted single female homeowners prompting severe asset depletion among single women, people of color, and those who depend on them. Rather than protecting them from risk, their home equity and bodies absorbed the failures of capitalism within their network. The paper draws on a thematic analysis of interviews with 21 single female homeowners who experienced mortgage default. Rather than focusing on risk incidence, I take their relational pathways as the object of inquiry demonstrating how activities of gendered care work act as conduits and amplifiers of financialised risk that extends the responsibility for unpaid social provision throughout the lifespan. The analysis demonstrates how their status as homeowners positioned them in between market failures and the consequences of austerity thereby restructuring the function of home equity.

About 12 per cent of households in Finland live in social rental housing. The Finnish system of social housing is now facing challenges. Finland has reached a situation where large numbers of social rental dwellings are free from regulation because the state housing loans have been paid off, while new production of such housing is unable to make up for this loss. Potentially this means a decrease in the social rental housing stock. Current housing policy discourse sees social housing more as a failed policy than a necessary welfare measure. Such developments can be related to a larger change in the Finnish housing regime. It has entered a phase of retrenchment, where the government withdraws from its previous commitment to housing provision in order to give more room to market forces. Retrenchment has led to the strengthening of one of the basic features of Finnish housing policy, its selectiveness.

This article examines the marked decline in Irish social housing’s traditional role as the main source of accommodation for low-income households. We argue that although this policy redirection has become clearly apparent in the context of the Global Financial Crisis; its roots are, in fact, much older. They lie, not in Ireland’s most recent fiscal crisis, but in the last one which occurred between the late 1970s and mid-1980s. Changes made to arrangements for funding social housing during this time effected a long-term contraction in the social housing’s contribution to total housing output which, in turn, precipitated growing reliance on housing allowance subsidised private rented housing to accommodate this group.  The post-GFC austerity merely accelerated this long-term trend rather than signalled a new policy direction.

Partnerships have a long history in European social housing with a mixed degree of success. They are an emerging model in post-socialist countries driven by budgetary constraints, rapid privatisation of public housing, and pragmatic efforts to respond to a complex housing affordability crisis. This article evaluates the challenges and opportunities of a new partnership model implemented in Albania to provide social rental housing. The project, launched in 2009, involves a legally defined partnership between central and local governments, the private sector, and an international financial institution. It has doubled the amount of municipal rental housing, addressing the needs of low- and mid-income households in Albania through the construction of 1,138 rental apartments for 4,300 people in eight cities. The allocation process, although politically charged, has been targeted. The partnership has capitalised on efficiencies, sound fiscal management, and cost and quality control. Despite some construction delays and potential concerns related to future sustainability, we argue that the partnership model is effective and has an important learning and innovation role for the future provision of social housing in Albania as well as in other post-socialist countries in South-East Europe facing similar challenges.

Editorial.

In this paper we look at the position of social renting in Flanders after the GFC. It is argued that the GFC has hardly affected the production levels of social rental dwellings. On the contrary levels remain higher than before the GFC. Starting from that, we briefly illustrate what the current debates in social rental housing are.

Hungary stepped on a very specific path two years into the Global Financial Crisis and the recession in its wake, on which it replaced ‘traditional’ austerity programs with ‘unorthodox’ economic policy. This policy paradigm shift affected the emerging social housing policy in two respects. First, the mainstream approach to social problems related to worsening housing affordability (due to increased loan repayments and other cost items together with decreasing incomes) provided strong support for the middle class. Second, intervention toward low income households remained minimal, and served only to pacify political tensions. This dual approach characterized the policy of the government, and resulting shift in the social structure did not necessarily follow the direction policy makers intended. Programs aimed at the middle class were poorly targeted, and often helped the upper middle class the most, who again did not behave the way policy makers expected (which would have been increased consumption to stimulate economic growth). Programs aimed at low income groups rendered the social structure more rigid, decreased the chance of low income persons to escape from extreme poverty, and cemented the opportunity discrepancies between the rich and the poor. The most recent housing policy measures suggest that the mistakes committed in the 2000s will likely be repeated, and there are not measures in place which could correct their course.

This article aims to explain the effects of the recent economic and financial crisis on housing conditions and the ability of Portuguese families to access housing. It also intends to discuss how the crisis is reconfiguring the housing patterns, in terms of access to housing and changes in public policies, questioning the predominant mode of access to housing based on homeownership. This article also discusses the role of social housing in the Portuguese housing system and the changes and challenges in this sector coming from the economic and financial constraints of families and the state. This article is structured in three parts. The first is an overview of the Portuguese housing system and social housing in particular, highlighting the conditions and reasons that led to a reduced social housing stock and to the predominance of homeownership. The second part discusses the impact of the crisis on families and the state, trying to demonstrate how the constraints on both are translated into (1) worsening housing conditions, (2) a diversification of groups struggling to access housing in the private market and (3) a reduction of affordable housing, pressing the social housing sector. Finally, the third part is a reflection on the changes that the crisis has had in the orientation of housing policies and their instruments, arguing that the patterns of the Portuguese housing system are changing with emphasis on the need to diversify the housing supply to increasingly diverse groups in housing need.

Urban green space was largely underestimated as a potential for healthy and liveable environments in the state socialist countries. In Soviet Russia, green in the city was part of urban planning but more as a proclamation and mostly implemented in a top-down-manner. During postsocialist transformation, economic restructuring dwarfed the debate on urban nature and greening. Within last years, we see a change here: Urban nature for residential quality and well-being has become more relevant for people, their perceptions and daily practices. The paper analyses the development and main characteristics of urban green spaces in Arkhangelsk, Russia. It discusses the importance of urban nature for human well-being, housing and its contribution to social cohesion and local identity. The paper argues that urban greening is not only a planning tool to create liveable and healthy urban environments but also an important strategy in awareness raising and public involvement activities.

Editorial

This paper reflects on the different faces of asset-based welfare from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective. It shows that asset-based welfare can be perceived as a lever for welfare state restructuring but also as an instrument for poverty eradication. In most countries, asset-based welfare policies focus on stimulating home-ownership. The general idea is that by becoming a homeowner, households build up equity that can be released for care and pension purposes in old age. However, there are signs that such policies increase inequality between homeowners (depending on the location of the dwelling and/or the period in which it was bought), but particularly so between homeowners and tenants. We therefore contend that home-ownership based welfare policies need a clear and fundamental specification of the role of the government: how to deal with housing market risks and how to prevent politically unacceptable levels of inequality and exclusion?

Housing wealth has been viewed as the main route to asset-based welfare. Accumulated wealth is supposed to provide more in the way of welfare services than just shelter, services such as a net pension and the financing of long-term care. This paper challenges this view and highlights the new risks attached to acquiring and managing housing wealth. Although assets may provide a nest egg in old age, earlier on in the life cycle they leave mortgagers disproportionately exposed to financial and housing market risks and amplify susceptibility to existing social risks such as unemployment or sickness. In contrast to social insurance schemes, assets individualise social risks and leave it to the individual to smooth housing consumption over their life. This lack of risk pooling constitutes a new and hidden social risk that should be considered in the discussion around homeownership.

One idea widespread in current discourse on the ageing population speaks of the ‘intergenerational inequity’ between the elderly and the young. This assumption overlooks the extensive lifetime financial transfers from older to younger generations that occur within families. Housing wealth may reinforce inequalities over generations, but this wealth also provides an opportunity to assist offspring in entering the housing market. The increase in house prices in recent years has put parents in an even better position to provide financial support. Instead of following the distributional principles that guides redistribution within the welfare state, this distribution may reproduce or even increase social inequalities. Intergenerational inequalities in economic prosperity may therefore also lead to intragenerational inequalities between those who have parents that can help and those who do not. However, this type of inequality may strengthen rather than weaken family solidarity.

This paper looks at housing strategy in a wider social and economic context and argues that a household’s (class) position in society depends on important life decisions, one of the most important of which is a person’s employment strategy and preparation for the period of retirement (pensions), which is related to housing decisions. The main context of these decisions is the welfare regime, but also a country’s economic structure (varieties of capitalism) and housing system (tax and subsidy elements of programmes). However, as the paper argues, these systems are also changing in relation to the macro effect of individual decisions.