The general trends in housing systems in Western Europe are fairly similar. All countries went through a phase of great housing shortages and strong government involvement in the fifties and sixties. At present the housing market is loosening up. The government is withdrawing from housing provision in more and more countries. As a result, market parties are acquiring more latitude. In the Netherlands, this policy shift occurred only recently. The introduction of the memorandum on Housing in the Nineties (Ministry of Housing, 1989) led to this break in the trend. The motives currently underlying government intervention were formulated in that Housing Memorandum. There are much more modest in nature than the motives that prevailed until then. Thus, since 1989, the most important goal of housing policy has been to let the housing market function better. Furthermore, concrete government aid should be directed towards the lower-income groups. Accordingly an indicative limit of Nlg. 30,000 in disposable household income per year was set for aligibility. This limit corresponds to the modal income in the Netherlands. The memorandum noted that distribution of the available housing stock largely determines the extent to which the government must provide financial support to house the target groups of the policy adequately. Therefore, 'Housing in the Nineties' poses specific questions about the degree of 'disequilibrium' in housing distribution. To what extent do households with a relatively high income live in cheap rented dwellings? To what extent are lower-income groups accommodated in expensive rented dwellings? The memorandum refers to this phenomenon as 'mismatch' and differentiates cheap and expensive mismatch. Major methodological objections can be made to this designation. Also the term mismatch implies a negative value judgment. However, there are positive aspects of a social rented sector that is heterogeneous in terms of income of its occupants. Ghettoization and segregation, which occur in many British cities, can be avoided by way of mismatch. Thus, various authors (Deben, 1989; Boelhouwer and Priemus, 1990, Diele