Securing Social Gains in, Against and Beyond the State: The Case of Denmark’s “Common Housing”

ABSTRACT

Public housing is a public sector that has been severely affected by privatization policies. Not so in Denmark, however, where public housing is not provided directly by the State but is run by independent housing associations: the “common housing” sector. This sector is the outcome of a compromise between the social-democratic movement and liberal-conservative parties in the 1920-30s. The social-democrats were politically too weak to implement their “municipal socialism” programme, which included (municipal) State-owned housing. This weakness, however, has in fact proven itself to be strength in the face of recent State-led privatization and mercantilization schemes. This experience problematizes the assumptions underlying the historical construction of the welfare State and its role in stewarding resources that are put in common, particularly in the sphere of housing. Instituting the common beyond the direct reach of the State is a lesson that can be learnt from the demise of social-democratic welfare statism.

KEYWORDS:

• Public housing
• welfare State
• common
• socialization
• privatization

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank Henrik Gutzon Larsen, Lotte Jensen, Birgitta Gómez Nielsen, Chloé Atkinson, the editor and the anonymous referees for their comments and insights.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The 1980 housing act gave sitting individual council tenants the right to buy their house or flat at below market rates, with the objective of expanding home ownership at the expense of the public housing stock (for a more exhaustive overview see, for example, Jones and Murie 2008).

2. The literature is vast and varied, such as the aforementioned Jessop (1982) compilation (Clarke 1991) or the Jessop’s (1982) efforts in summarising and systematising as well as developing (Jessop, 2002) Marxist theory of the State are useful sources.

3. This has been further explored in relation to housing in a previous special issue in this journal (McKee et al. 2015).

4. The expression “in, against and beyond” is taken from Holloway (2010), yet has been reinterpreted for this applied analysis.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundació “la Caixa”;