5(27)
room should be at least four square meters in size and over two meters
high to be counted.
The overcrowding problem seems particularly acute in many former
communist countries. In the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, over
60% of households at risk of poverty are identified as lacking space. The
same figure is approximately 35% in Greece and Italy, while in Sweden and
Portugal it is over 20%. In Sweden, reports of overcrowding have increased
among households with the lowest disposable incomes (Statistics Sweden,
2004, p.93). Furthermore, concurrent with reports of increasing
overcrowding in Sweden as a whole, in the late 1990s, there were reports
of increasing overcrowding among Swedish housing allowance
4
recipients
(Swedish Housing Board, 2006, p.50). This took place at the same time as
other countries in Europe experienced changes in their housing policies.
According to Clark and Onaka (1983), space is the dominant housing unit
characteristic that induces moves, and such moves may be triggered by
changes in institutional structures.
Housing policy has clearly shifted throughout Europe, as housing markets
have moved away from regulations and subsidies toward more free market
arrangements. In Sweden, where housing policy has traditionally been a
core element of the welfare system, this shift occurred in the 1990s (cf.
Enström Öst, 2012). At that time, a generous subsidy system, with large
general interest subsidies for new construction and rehabilitation, was
replaced with assistance targeting single parents and lower-income
households (Turner and Whitehead, 2002). As part of this change, and for
the prime objective of cutting the expense of the housing allowance
scheme, the Swedish housing allowance system was reformed in 1996–
1997 (hereafter, “the 1997 reform”). This resulted in an expenditure
decrease of almost 50% or SEK 4 billion as well as stricter eligibility criteria
than before, and the number of housing allowance recipients decreased by
approximately 50% over the 1996–2001 period (RFV, 2001, p.8). This
reform introduced a dwelling size constraint, relative to household size, into
the Swedish housing allowance system. With the implementation of this
reform, recipients could receive a housing allowance only for the part of the
useful floor space that is within the set limit; previously, no restrictions
were placed on the physical size of recipients’ apartments. Households with
floor space above this limit received a reduced housing allowance, while
households with floor space under the limit were unaffected by the reform.
Though this size limit has been criticized for creating a lock-in effect when
it comes to housing, this reform has not previously been formally
evaluated.
Despite the large social housing allowance experiments conducted in the
USA, the effect of housing allowances on housing consumption is still
debated and questioned, possibly due to differences between housing
markets or to institutional differences between housing allowance systems
that make it difficult to draw general conclusions. A growing literature
therefore reports the results of comparative studies of various countries
and their housing allowance schemes (see, e.g., Ditch et al., 2001; Kemp,
1990, 2000; Lujanen 2004; Olsen 2002, 2003; Åhrén, 1990).
4
The number of families with children that live in overcrowded conditions among Swedish
housing allowance recipients increased by approximately 15 percentage points between 1994 and
2002.
