Paradigm Shifts in Social Housing after Welfare‐State Transformation: Learning from the German Experience

Abstract

Welfare-state transformation and entrepreneurial urban politics in Western welfare states since the late 1970s have yielded converging trends in the transformation of the dominant Fordist paradigm of social housing in terms of its societal function and institutional and spatial form. In this article I draw from a comparative case study on two cities in Germany to show that the resulting new paradigm is simultaneously shaped by the idiosyncrasies of the country's national housing regime and local housing policies. While German governments have successively limited the societal function of social housing as a legitimate instrument only for addressing exceptional housing crises, local policies on providing and organizing social housing within this framework display significant variation. However, planning and design principles dominating the spatial forms of social housing have been congruent. They may be interpreted as both an expression of the marginalization of social housing within the restructured welfare housing regime and a tool of its implementation according to the logics of entrepreneurial urban politics.

How tenants’ reactions to rent increases affect displacement: An interactionist approach to gentrification

“…To confrontationally reject a rent increase, tenants must first define this situation as problematic and unbearably unfair, and second, ascribe situational agency to themselves. Particularly, the conflictual co-existence of a moral economy still connected to the ‘Fordist paradigm’ of housing (Schönig, 2020) and a neoliberalised moral economy becomes apparent – also, that agency has both a normative-moral and a strategic dimension intertwined in a situational context. To understand the concrete ‘landlord-tenant power relationship’ (Byrne and McArdle, 2022: 124) and the visible, hidden or even invisible dimension of power disabling or enabling tenants to raise their voices against their landlords (Chisholm et al, 2020), both dimensions must be considered.…”

“…As is the case with other Western welfare states, neoliberalisation has hit the German housing market, with the non-profit housing sector in West Germany being ‘practically dismantled’ by the end of the 1980s (Schönig, 2020: 6) and the state phasing out provision for social housing units. The ‘hegemonial Fordist paradigm of providing quality “housing for all” dissolved’ (Schönig, 2020: 1), former public and non-profit housing was privatised and, in the following decades, different variations of financialisation restructured the German housing market and the rental sector (Wijburg et al, 2018). Especially after the financial crisis of the late 20th century, new actors (e.g.…”

“…He emphasises that implicit contractual relationships including reciprocity and the distribution of certain ‘property rights’ are ‘the product and subject of constant renegotiation and disputes in which all parties involved attempt to expand their own scope of action’ (Hohenstatt, 2017: 51; translated by the authors). Hohenstatt identifies transformations arising from privatising non-profit housing stock: tenants recognised violations of an implicit rental contract based on a moral economy embedded in the ‘Fordist paradigm’ (Schönig, 2020), and this created the condition to define dissent and to act in a confrontational manner. To summarise, this concept helps to understand the normative references and moral interpretive repertoires of tenants in situations of a rent increase, and how conflicts arise or do not arise.…”