ABSTRACT
The tradition of social housing in Europe goes back to the social conflicts related to urbanization in the nineteenth century, and it became a determining factor in the housing system after World War I, largely because of the introduction of rent control regulations. Social housing in different European countries developed independently for the most part, following the political and historical traditions of individual countries. The creation of the EU made the question of divergence and convergence highly relevant, despite the fact that housing is not an EU-level competency (Priemus 2004; Doling 1997; Gibb 2002; Oxley 2000; Priemus and Dieleman 2002; Scalon and Whithead 2007). The European social housing sector is undergoing changes that point towards both convergence and divergence (Harloe 1995; Kemeny 1995, 2006). However, convergence tends to dominate: “we would expect all advanced capitalist countries to be experiencing the same sorts of pressures and to be responding in similar ways and we might expect to find superficial evidence of similarity and a vulnerability to the advancing hegemony of the neo-liberal economic model” (Malpass 2008, 24).
