ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to unravel the hidden reasons that fostered the discourse, and additionally to deal with their consequences, being a decrease of affordable social rental housing in Flanders, Belgium. Discourse analysis emerged during the late 1960s as a practice, which was influenced by several disciplines. Since then, discourse analysis has become commonly used in many social science domains. In Flanders, only a very small share of the housing stock can be considered as social rental housing. This follows from a longstanding and stable policy option to solve housing problems by stimulating homeownership of single family dwellings preferably outside the cities. At the end of the 1980s the discourse on social rental housing started to jump scales and since then underwent major changes. At first the discourse promoted inclusion, later the discourses became exclusionary. The discourse changed from promoting social rental dwellings for poor and/or foreign people to advocating lowering intake of certain categories of people.
