ABSTRACT
Cost renting has often undergone a process of maturation under very specific historical political circumstances. For although cost renting can in theory be organised in many different ways, in practice it has been most commonly provided by the central or local state as a means of overcoming an acute housing shortage. Sometimes —though by no means always-this has been done as part of a socialist strategy of state control of key sectors of the economy. As already indicated, other forms of cost renting, such as rental co-operatives and cost rental trusts, have been less common, partly because socialist movements at a very early stage almost universally adopted statist strategies in preference to co-operative and mutual aid ones.
