Wiley-Blackwell The People′s Home?: Social Rented Housing in Europe and America (Studies in Urban and Social Change)

"The People's Home?" is an examination of the development of social rented housing over the last hundred years in six advanced capitalist countries - Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and the USA. Exploring the relationship between broader societal changes (principally economic and political) and the changing nature of social housing provision over this period, Michael Harloe breaks new trails in the analysis of housing policy. The author identifies two dominant forms of social housing provision: "residual" and "mass". The former, he shows, predominates in periods of economic and political times of stability, while the latter becomes dominant in times of societal crisis of restructuring. The book ends by discussing the implications of this analysis for recent theories of welfare state development, or regimes of "welfare capitalism", and for the nature of state housing policies in such societies.