Social Housing and Rent Regulation: What Works and Why

Social housing and rent regulation are the two instruments with which cities try to keep housing within reach of those the market pushes out: the first creates a stock outside the market, publicly or cooperatively owned with rents tied to income; the second limits how much and when rents in the private stock can rise. Both have been defended by Raquel Rolnik, Brazilian architect and United Nations rapporteur on housing from 2008 to 2014, and by Peter Marcuse, planner at Columbia, and both are the object of a technical and political debate worth knowing with data.

Raquel Rolnik: large social stocks against financialisation

Rolnik starts from the diagnosis of Urban Warfare (2019): since the 1980s states sold public housing, deregulated rents and opened housing to financial markets, and the result is a global affordability crisis. Her mandate documented that countries with large social stocks resisted better: Vienna houses more than 60 percent of its residents in municipal or subsidised housing, the Netherlands and Denmark keep around a third in social rent, Singapore close to 80 percent in public flats. Where the stock was sold, as in the United Kingdom from 1980, the public bill for private rent subsidies ended up exceeding what it cost to maintain it.

Peter Marcuse: broad, non-residual social housing

Marcuse supplies the criterion: housing policy must be judged by what it does for those with least, not by how much construction it stimulates. In Searching for the Just City (2009) and in his work on displacement he argues that social housing should not be residual, a refuge for the poorest, but broad and mixed, as in Vienna, so that it does not stigmatise and so that it has political support. And that rent regulation is not an anomaly but the normal way of protecting tenants in most advanced economies for much of the twentieth century.

What the evidence says about rent regulation

The evidence on rent regulation is nuanced. Rigid, permanent first-generation caps, such as postwar New York's, reduced supply and maintenance, and economists cite them as a warning; the study by Diamond, McQuade and Qian on San Francisco showed that they protected covered tenants but pushed landlords to convert flats into condominiums. Second- and third-generation systems, with increases indexed to inflation, long leases and exemptions for new construction, as in Germany, Sweden or the Netherlands, protect without those effects. Berlin tried a strict cap in 2020 that the Constitutional Court struck down in 2021; Catalonia regulated in 2020 with contested results and Spain passed in 2023 a national law with stressed zones.

Land: the third pillar of affordability

The two tools need each other. Regulation protects those who already have housing but creates none; the social stock creates housing but takes decades to reach scale. Rolnik and Marcuse add a third pillar: land. Without public land or mandatory quotas in every development, such as the 30 percent Barcelona approved in 2018 or the land cessions of Spanish planning law, social housing has nowhere to be built and regulation faces alone a market that keeps rising. Vienna has bought land for a century and can therefore build; Singapore owns almost all its land and can therefore house.

The lesson is that urban affordability is produced neither by the market nor by a single instrument, but by a combination sustained over decades: a broad, mixed social stock, rent regulation with clear rules, public land and taxation that discourages empty homes and speculative purchase. Rolnik sums it up as housing being a right and not an asset; Marcuse, as housing policy being distribution policy. The cities that have understood it are not exceptions; they are the ones that started earlier.