Land Policy’s Influence on the Resilience and Fragility of Social Housing Systems: comparing active and passive, targeted and generalist land management strategies in Austria, England and the Netherlands

This paper explores the ways in which land supply and price, the policies and mechanisms used to manage them and changes to these arrangements over time have influenced the long-term trajectories of social housing systems in three Western European countries. The argument offered here is that land policy has exerted a major, and underappreciated, influence on the resilience and fragility of social housing systems – meaning their tendency to expand (in resilient cases) or contract (which indicates fragility) over the long run in terms of the proportion of all households accommodated. Land policy can provide a valuable ‘invisible’ subsidy for social housing which plays a particularly important role in enabling the sector to withstand adverse changes in the wider political economy such as economic or fiscal crisis and growing ideological and political opposition. These ideas are explored in comparative and historical perspective by examining changes in land policy and social housing supply in Austria, England, and the Netherlands since the early twentieth century. The analysis focuses on the extent to which arrangements for providing land for social housing and land policy more broadly focus on replacing, steering, subsidising, or enabling land markets.