Bringing new ideas to housing research

Building, housing, and urban pathology have been discussed in the literature worldwide. In recent years, the Polish residential market has seen the emergence of extremely small and non-functional dwellings, very dense residential projects with limited access to sunlight and small playgrounds, and even projects built in the middle of nowhere. The media show more and more outrageous cases of what has come to be called ‘pathodevelopment’. The problem is real and it has economic, social, and legal dimensions and consequences. Using desk research and case study methods, this article attempts to create a holistic definition of ‘pathodevelopment’, classifies its forms, and considers the reasons for this phenomenon. According to the author, ‘pathodevelopment’ is related to various unethical actions taken by developers trying to maximise their profits, while acting to the detriment of future residents, the owners of neighbouring properties, and sometimes even municipalities. These actions can be institutional, urban, infrastructural, architecture, construction, or marketing in nature. 

The growth of private renting is a distinctive feature of 21st-century housing systems. In some countries, this has been driven by corporate landlords in the direction of rentier capitalism, escalating the affordability crisis. In Australia, these institutional landlords have less purchase. Theoretically, this could buy time to invent a more sustainable rental model; in practice, corporate capital may be establishing a different bridgehead for similar shifts in the housing economy.  To explore this, we track changes in the proportion of housing held by individual absentee proprietary owners. We find their share is growing, mainly through an increase in properties intermittently generating rental returns. This coincides with the expanding role of PropTech start-ups – intermediaries financializing the frontier of secondary property ownership. Australian housing may thus be less at the lagging edge of a shift to institutional ownership, and more at the cutting edge of a further round of ‘profits before people’.

The aim of this paper is to assess the impact of different categories of geopolitical risk (GPR) on housing prices and identify its transmission channels in a border country of the European Union. The analysis focuses on Poland, which constitutes the EU’s eastern border, has the largest and most dynamic housing market in the region, and is directly adjacent to war-torn Ukraine. The study utilises a vector autoregression (VAR) model for diagnostic purposes and a multiple linear regression (MLR) model for identifying the types of geopolitical risk responsible for observed price responses. The VAR results confirmed the existence of an indirect channel (the immigration channel). In the MLR, the aggregate GPR is statistically insignificant, while selected risk categories have a varied impact on the short-term dynamics of housing prices.

‘Generation Rent’ refers to the disproportionate presence of young people in the private rental sector due to declining access to homeownership, a phenomenon that first emerged in the liberal housing systems of the United Kingdom and the United States. This study examines whether the concept is also relevant in more government-steered housing systems, such as that of the Netherlands. Drawing on data from the large-scale Dutch housing needs surveys (WoON), we find that while the Dutch system long resisted tendencies associated with Generation Rent, the past 15 years of neoliberal policies have significantly altered this trajectory. The outcome is growing inequality between the young adults who achieve homeownership, often through intergenerational support, and those who remain in the rental sector. To mitigate this divide, we propose revitalising the rental sector and introducing tenure-neutral housing policies.

This article examines how internally displaced persons from the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh negotiate the distinction between house and home in Yerevan, Armenia, through a study that draws on 30 narrative interviews conducted in 2022 and 2023. The study explores participants'' movement across three dominant post-displacement housing setting: collective housing, co-residing with family, and rental housing. It examines how participants’ experiences are shaped by the distinct conditions of entry, legitimate use, and temporal security afforded by each setting, rather than treating these settings as mere “options” that differ only in comfort and quality. By bringing together phenomenological ideas of home and materialist ideas of housing, the research develops a conceptual model of home-making that is grounded in practice and shaped by the interrelationship between housing settings, appropriation, and futurity. The research demonstrates that ‘not feeling at home’ is a practice that participants undertake in response to revocability in housing settings, and that participants'' actions of cleaning, repairing, and organising a space and the establishing of routines are all done amidst considerations/expectations of disruption. The research identifies distinct temporalities in institutional, relational, and market settings and demonstrates how constraints on spatial appropriation generate non-investment in a sense of home, even in housing that is materially sufficient. The research concludes with a discussion of the implications for housing policy that is grounded in a realist understanding of how to enable home-making, and how this requires moving beyond merely providing housing towards focusing on how to reduce revocability and to enable legitimate forms of appropriation that are modest and inexpensive.

Transdisciplinarity has become an increasingly prominent concept in addressing today’s complex societal challenges and is often invoked as a buzzword in grant proposals. But how can a transdisciplinary approach to housing be implemented? This contribution presents a systematisation of our experiences in an EU-funded project, which could serve as a starting point for similar processes. Key to the use of such an approach is creating an understanding of societal challenges by bringing together insights from different disciplines and fields of knowledge in academia and practice. Our main conclusion was that preconditions are just as important as the design of the transdisciplinary process, and these preconditions include gaining an understanding of the needs and specificities of the stakeholders. Furthermore, a “three types of knowledge model” for organising knowledge exchange processes, adopted from the Swiss school of transdisciplinarity, enabled the redefinition of challenges and the identification of new perspectives and strategies for change in practice.

Much remains unknown about whether housing supply converges across regions over time. Therefore, this paper aims to outline the theoretical drivers and barriers of housing supply convergence and to perform an empirical analysis across all municipalities in Poland for 2009–2024. Housing supply was examined from the perspectives of the housing market (new housing for sale/rent) and urban dynamics (total housing stock). Using the Phillips-Sul approach, the study found that housing supply converges across the analysed areas. Specifically, supply from a housing market perspective is characterised by level convergence, meaning it tends towards a stable long-term value. Conversely, supply from the urban dynamics perspective follows a path of growth convergence, with the rates of change in housing supply gradually becoming similar across municipalities over time. These convergence patterns suggest moderate allocative efficiency of housing supply in Poland.

In 2017, the Government of Canada launched the National Housing Strategy (NHS), marking a renewed federal role in housing after decades of limited engagement. Using Bacchi’s What’s the Problem Represented to Be (WPR) approach paired with a housing justice lens, this paper examines how the NHS and related consultation documents construct the problem of housing in Canada. Rather than evaluating the Strategy’s successes or failures, the analysis focuses on how housing inequality is represented, the assumptions underlying these representations, and the implications for the types of solutions considered. The paper identifies two key logics shaping problem representations: the obfuscation of systemic inequities and the legitimization of market-based solutions. This framing shapes which interventions are visible or feasible within the Strategy, highlighting how policy discourse can constrain transformative approaches to housing inequality while maintaining existing structures.

Studentification – the influx of university students into urban neighbourhoods – has significant socio-spatial and economic implications. While many studies analyse institutionally steered studentification shaped by universities, municipalities, or developers, studentification driven by everyday landlord–tenant negotiations in weakly regulated private rental markets receives far less scholarly attention. This article investigates such a pathway in a historically working-class neighbourhood in Ankara, Turkey, showing how bottom-up dynamics sustain coexistence yet generate new forms of precarity. Drawing on a resident survey and in-depth interviews with students, long-term residents, landlords, and business owners, the study demonstrates how student in-migration reshapes the local economy, community relations, and housing. The findings reveal rising rents, insecure tenancy, and displacement risks, alongside coexistence, neighbourhood vibrancy, and a student-driven leisure economy. In contrast to the planning- and PBSA-led models typical of the Global North (e.g. Boston, Edinburgh), studentification in Ankara unfolds through everyday landlord–tenant negotiations and peer networks rather than institutional planning. These dynamics advance the understanding of adaptive studentification, clarifying the mechanisms that maintain everyday order and the conditions that expose their limits in weakly regulated housing markets.

For three decades, Private Rented Sector (PRS) growth has been driven by part-time, small-scale, profit-seeking landlords in several Western nations. While the characteristics and motivations of these landlords have been examined in some geographies, far less is known about their investment decision-making, particularly their reasons for choosing the PRS over alternative investment options. This matters because these decisions shape the sector’s growth and tenant welfare. The study begins to address this gap by exploring the role of asset tangibility in landlord investment decisions, drawing on research from other investment domains. A mixed methods study was conducted, comprising an online survey of 1,033 Scottish landlords and follow-up interviews with 33 landlords and PRS professionals. Findings suggest that some landlords exhibit a bias towards the ‘bricks and mortar’ tangibility of PRS investment, which shapes risk perceptions and aspects of their investment decision-making. The findings have several implications. For landlords, there are concerns around investment efficacy; for policymakers, questions about landlord financial literacy; and for tenants, risks to their welfare from landlord decision-making. While the findings are not directly transferable, they are likely to have salience in other nations with established PRSs, including Australia, Canada, the United States, and parts of Europe.

Throughout the European Union governments have reduced their investment in social housing, a trend that has also affected the Netherlands. Providers of social rental housing have faced policy changes that have challenged the dominant role in the unique Dutch unitary rental market regime. This paper examines the extent to which a revival of this dominant role can be attributed to the government’s recent interventions. It contextualises the subsequent challenges facing the housing market currently and in the future based on a review of relevant literature, policy documents, and input from interviewed experts. The largely qualitative interpretation shows that recent government interventions have given providers of social rental housing back some of the previous autonomy they had lost in terms of financing and regulation. We argue that providers of social rental housing are regaining a more important role in providing housing for low- and medium-income groups.

Austria has several elaborate instruments for financing the construction and the management of affordable housing, both public and private. The main public instrument that supports the delivery of both new affordable housing and finance renovations is the Wohnbauförderung der Länder, where funding is provided via the nine regional authorities in Austria. While this instrument has proved to be a relatively stable source of funding for affordable housing providers over many decades, recent developments in the housing market have presented a number of challenges to the effectiveness of this funding instrument. This paper takes stock of the system of public housing finance in Austria by looking at continuities and discontinuities between the 1990s and 2023, both in terms of public spending and in terms of the delivery of new affordable housing. The paper does this by drawing on public data on affordable housing finance and on data gathered and published by the Austrian Federation of Limited-Profit Housing Associations (GBV). The paper critically assesses this system and draws lessons of relevance for Austrian and EU housing policymaking.

This study examines the impact of Poland’s ‘2% Safe Mortgage’ policy on dwelling price inflation in both the primary and secondary markets. Using quarterly data from Q2 2011 to Q4 2024 for the seven largest cities in Poland and a VAR model with forecast scenarios, the analysis finds that the policy had a measurable effect on price dynamics. In the primary market, the credit shock led to an additional increase in dwelling price inflation of approximately 6.7 percentage points by the third quarter. In the secondary market, the effect was stronger, reaching around 7.4 percentage points compared to a no-policy scenario. A significant share of price growth was also driven by indirect factors, including expectations of further increases. The analysis shows the importance of well-designed government policy in shaping housing market outcomes and mitigating unintended price pressures.

The Recovery and Resilience Plans that were launched in response to the COVID-19 crisis mark a shift in the European Union’s approach to crisis management that involves expanding the use of community funds to address housing challenges through an integrated and multidimensional framework. In Portugal, the 1st Right – Housing Access Support Programme serves as the primary mechanism for tackling housing precarity, making it the main recipient of this funding. This article examines the programme’s implementation through three core dimensions: progress towards quantitative targets, equity in territorial funding distribution, and institutional capacity. It analyses how housing precarity is defined in housing policies, how resources are distributed across municipalities, and what challenges hinder the programme’s effectiveness. The findings highlight the need for process optimisation, strategic planning, and stronger support for disadvantaged regions to ensure that the programme meets its goals of social and territorial cohesion. By drawing lessons from the Portuguese case, this study provides insights for other EU Member States, highlighting the importance of policy frameworks that combine shared objectives with locally responsive implementations.