https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0791-1598
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Abstract
Recently, cities across Europe have experienced rising prices for land, construction and increasing housing costs. The question of how companies providing social housing mediate housing policies in light of increasing market challenges has been widely neglected. The article takes the case of Vienna to explore how limited-profit housing associations – the current main providers of social housing – navigate market changes. Following Bourdieu, the article employs a field approach to map the power relations governing the field of social housing construction and explore their influence on strategies for capital accumulation. Drawing on multiple correspondence analysis and qualitative interviews, the article shows that the city’s introduction of competitive tenders for building plots strengthened cultural and social capital over economic capital within the field. It provides an in-depth analysis of the market effects of housing policy instruments by locating their structuring effects in relational market configurations rather than solely focusing on housing market outcomes.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank our colleagues from the research group SPACE (Claudius Gräbner, Stephan Pühringer, Georg Wolfmayr, Ana Rogojanu, Matthias Aistleitner, Susanna Azevedo, Theresa Hager, Raphaela Kohout, Sarah Kumnig, Laura Porak and Johanna Rath) for valuable comments on earlier drafts of the paper.
Notes
1 Despite rents being comparable between the two segments, limited-profit housing requires down payments, which are returned to tenants when they move out (deducted by 1 percent per year), posing an access barrier for low-income households.
2 The city recently relaunched its building activities, but only a very limited number of units are built.
3 This also includes management/maintenance costs as well as financing costs (Pittini et al Citation2021).
4 Public loans usually account for one quarter to half of the financing costs (GBV Citation2016, 91).
6 In 2019, wohnfonds_wien owned 3.2 million m2 of land, which amounts to 2.2% of the area dedicated as building land (Gutheil-Knopp-Kirchwald & Getzner, Citation2012).
8 An exception is Metzger’s (Citation2021) analysis of social housing in Hamburg, Germany, which elaborates the structural relationships of social positions in the field of social housing and highlights the relevance of different capital forms for cooperatives in Hamburg.
9 The third dimension only accounts for 6.6%, which means that the multi-dimensional space can be interpreted as a two-dimensional without losing much explanatory strength (82% of total variance).
10 Although innovation does not only grow out of participating in DCs, the term seems suitable for this group since being successful in DCs requires constant innovation regarding architecture, housing techniques, environmental issues, and social aspects.