Post-neoliberal housing policy? Disentangling recent reforms in New York, Berlin and Vienna

Abstract

In cities worldwide, the housing question has returned. As demands and proposals by housing movements have grown bolder, city governments are implementing new policies, ranging from small tweaks to major overhauls. This paper takes a close look at New York City, Berlin and Vienna, assessing their current housing policy landscapes. We evaluate to what extent those cities’ recent housing reforms depart from the dominant, neoliberal policy landscape of recent decades and can be categorized as ‘post-neoliberal’. We do so through the criteria of affordability, decommodification and democratization. The three selected cities display varying histories of housing systems and neoliberalization, enabling us to search for post-neoliberal policies in three distinct institutional contexts. We find a common pattern across cases: recent reforms have improved affordability and dampened hyper-commodification, but little has been done to address the democratization of housing and planning systems. By way of conclusion, we discuss some of the structural factors that impede attempts at developing a genuinely post-neoliberal transformation of local housing policies.

The Changing Role of Student Housing as Social Infrastructure

“…This might allow a better understanding of overlooked impacts of the ongoing financialisation of student housing. It also ensures more nuanced reflections on the role of local public actors and policymaking as the loss of the social dimension within student housing might not only be triggered by global capital investment but also influenced by policy shifts (Aigner, 2020;Kadi et al, 2021). Comparative research including the perspectives of other European cities would yield further insight into the converging of processes in the context of the internationalisation of higher education as well as the financialisation of student housing.…”

“…Debates broaching transitions of housing markets, in general, have become well-represented in academic discourses, also for the example of Vienna (for ongoing debates, see Aigner, 2020;Friesenecker & Kazepov, 2021;Gruber & Franz, 2019;Kadi et al, 2021;Kohlbacher & Reeger, 2020;Musil et al, 2022). However, discussions about eroding or missing social housing policies for institutional student housing and its implications for social infrastructure provision remain under-represented.…”

“Lex Developer” in Practice - The Scale of Application in the Largest Polish Cities

“…The financing of housing resources and their hyper-commodification have led to a break in the climbing the housing ladder (Marcuse & Madden, 2016;Rogers et al, 2018;Jackobs & Manzi, 2020;Kadi et al, 2021). Increasing the supply offered by households, which improved their standard of living due to higher housing aspirations and income opportunities, was stopped by strengthening the investment value of housing units.…”

Vienna

“…This is true despite the fact that eligibility criteria for a large proportion of municipal housing stock and parts of the new subsidised stock have become targeted at the inclusion of vulnerable groups, as well as including parts of the (increasingly precarious) middle classes (Friesenecker and Kazepov, 2021). Continuous investment in maintaining old (and building new) social housing each year, as well as recent reforms countering neoliberal tendencies, will potentially strengthen the redistributive capacity of the City's housing model (Kadi et al, 2021). However, this capacity will diminish, especially in combination with population growth (+350,000 inhabitants over the last 20 years: https://bit.ly/2TjOlS7), and diversifying housing needs.…”