Towards a Multi-layered Housing Regime Framework: Responses to Commentators

Abstract

In this article I respond to commentators’ observations relating to my Focus Article, “How housing systems are changing and why”, and propose a multi-layered housing regime framework. I argue that the institutions of housing system are naturally located in the middle-range, and fall into three distinct spheres of production, consumption and exchange. These spheres interaction with the “wider welfare regime” which represents the institutions of the labour market, taxation and social security. They have distinctive distributional tendencies and set the “boundaries of possibility” of the social rented sector’s role. Sitting above these middle-range institutions are macro-level drivers including macro-economic policy and the relatively new phenomenon of “really big finance” implied by unconventional monetary policies adopted by many central banks. Beneath the middle-range institutions lie regional and metropolitan markets where institutional variations and market pressures may produce intra-regime variation of outcomes.