This article examines variations in housing quality, accessibility and affordability in the EU, and on this basis proposes a typology of inter-country variations in housing conditions. This typology reveals good housing conditions in the ‘long-standing’ northern EU member states, intermediate conditions in most of the remaining ‘long-standing’ member states and poor conditions in many of the ‘new’ Central and Eastern European member states. The institutional context within which these variations have arisen is also considered specifically in relation to: housing tenure systems, finance and subsidy systems, construction systems and trends, and governance arrangements, as are the implications of these inequalities for the EU and how they can be addressed.

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Social housing policy in Ireland has evolved over several decades into a significantly marketized tenure which relies on, supports and expands the private housing market. In this paper we argue that it does so in ways that contribute to the financialization of housing by embedding housing in volatile financial market cycles. Although the majority of the literature on financialization, both in Ireland and internationally, has tended to focus on home ownership and mortgage markets, we argue that the retrenchment of social housing and the shift towards subsidized private rental accommodation have been key features of the process of financialization and of Ireland’s experience of boom and bust. The neoliberal turn in social housing policy, however, did not take shape in the form of either a coherent ideological project or a coherent suite of policy measures, but rather through the kind of piecemeal, ad hoc and typically ‘pragmatic’ processes identified by Kitchin et al. It is by examining the unfolding of these ad hoc processes that we identify both the neoliberalization of social housing policy and the interfaces between this process and that of financialization, particularly by highlighting how the former has enabled and facilitated the latter.

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Norris M, Winston N. Home‐ownership, housing regimes and income inequalities in Western Europe This article compares the structural features of home‐ownership systems in European Union 15 (EU15) countries (home‐ownership rates, mortgages and public subsidisation of this tenure) with data on inequalities in outcomes (variations in home‐ownership access, risks and standards between income groups). Its purpose was to assess the relevance of the debate on the convergence and divergence of housing systems, which has dominated the comparative housing literature. The article concludes that, depending on the level of analysis adopted and the particular variables selected for examination, elements of both convergence and divergence are evident in Western European home‐ownership systems. The comparative housing literature has also largely failed to capture the key inter‐country cleavages in home‐ownership systems that are between the Northern and Southern EU15 countries. These shortcomings are related to methodological and conceptual problems in the literature.

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Many scholars interpret the contraction in social housing and the expansion of home ownership as reflections of a reduced role for the state and an increase in the marketisation of housing. This paper challenges this interpretation by pointing to two weaknesses in its conceptual underpinnings. One is its failure to distinguish between housing as capital (traded in the purchase market for dwellings) and housing as a service (traded in the rental market for accommodation), leading to an underestimate of the extent and diversity of continuing state intervention in housing. The other problem is a narrow focus on the balance between market and state which neglects the role of self-provisioning in the household as a form of production. The alternative view proposed here is, first, that forms of state intervention in the markets for housing capital and services are so diverse and complex that a more comprehensive analysis is needed before conclusions on trends in the state's overall role can be reached, and, second, that while home ownership reflects a dominant role for the market in the distribution of housing capital, it reflects a familialisation of housing services -it enables households to self-provision themselves with accommodation and thereby remove this service from the realm of both market exchange and state provision. The paper also suggests that the welfare benefit of home ownership lies not only in its widely recognised social insurance effect but also in the efficiency and cost-reduction effects which self-provisioning of housing provides.