Social Housing in Transition Countries

This volume intends to fill the gap in the range of publications about the post-transition social housing policy developments in Central and Eastern Europe by delivering critical evaluations about the past two decades of developments in selected countries’ social housing sectors, and showing what conditions have decisively impacted these processes.

Contributors depict the different paths the countries have taken by reviewing the policy changes, the conditions institutions work within, and the solutions that were selected to answer the housing needs of vulnerable households. They discuss whether the differences among the countries have emerged due to the time lag caused by belated reforms in selected countries, or whether any of the disparities can be attributed to differences inherited from Soviet times. Since some of the countries have recently become member states of the European Union, the volume also explores whether there were any convergence trends in the policy approaches to social housing that can be attributed to the general changes brought about by the EU accession.

Nora Teller, a sociologist, has worked on several international projects for the Council of Europe, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the European Commission’s 5th, 6th and 7th Framework research programmes and the European Spatial Planning Observation Network (ESPON).

Jozsef Hegedus is a founding member of the Metropolitan Research Institute and a part-time associate professor at Corvinus University Budapest.

Martin Lux is head of the Department of Socio-Economics of Housing at the Institute of Sociology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague.