ABSTRACT
The goal of this chapter is to briefly describe the emergence and application of the social housing system in the Czech Republic after 1990. In this chapter, social housing is traditionally defined as housing offered at below-market rents and allocated to low-income and other vulnerable households. There are two specific features of the Czech housing system. The first is the scope of decentralization in housing policy (municipalities have the right to decide about the privatization of public housing). The second feature, a consequence of the first, is the slow pace of public (municipal) housing privatization in the Czech Republic. The early post-socialist governments decided to avoid introducing of right to buy policy in the Czech Republic. However, as I will demonstrate in this chapter, a larger share of public housing is no guarantee of more effective and efficient social housing policy. On the contrary, the overall policy in this field in the Czech Republic is evaluated in this chapter as ineffective and inefficient. Compared to other CEE countries, in the Czech Republic much of the urban housing stock expropriated by the state under the previous regime has been returned to the original owners or their descendants (about 7 percent of the total housing stock), and thus the quick emergence of the private rental sector is another distinguishing feature of the Czech housing system.
