Local housing markets and local housing policies: a comparative analysis of 14 German cities

Abstract

Over the last decade, the housing markets in major German cities have experienced major problems such as large increases in rental prices, decreases in affordable housing, housing shortage etc. As the reasons for those problems are common (strong demand due to dynamic immigration to the big cities, too little and too expensive new construction, and the reduction in social housing due to a lack of public money), differences between cities are seldomly addressed. Therefore, in this article, we discuss local housing policy in fourteen cities from a comparative perspective. The main goal is to analyse how cities respond to challenges by examining how they set agendas, formulate policy and implement their own measures, as well as the governance structures they use for tackling housing problems. The paper concludes that German cities are capable of pursuing an active housing policy, but that they depend on higher governance levels, i.e., federal and state policy.