The great social housing trade-off. ‘Insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ in urban social rental housing in Norway

In this paper, I ask how social housing providers in urban Norway balance between the needs of existing tenants (the insiders) and prospective residents (the outsiders). Based on qualitative interviews with social housing bureaucrats, I examine how the fifteen largest municipal social housing providers in Norway negotiate the trade-off between insiders and outsiders in housing allocation, rent setting and tenancy length decisions. While many of the institutional features of Norwegian social housing are designed to favour disadvantaged outsiders, this study suggests that openness to outsiders is counteracted by the protection of insider-tenants’ residential stability through housing allowances, frequent tenancy renewals and discretionary exceptions. The paper concludes with reflections on social mechanisms that may influence the great social housing trade-off between insiders and outsiders. I argue that tenant-turnover strategies are blunted in contexts where insider-tenants are often no more privileged than outsiders, and that a ‘virtue of necessity mechanism’ may protect the residential stability of insiders in heavily targeted social housing.