The post-neoliberalization of the Dutch regional housing market

Abstract

Since 2022, after decades of neoliberalization, the national government of the Netherlands is trying to regain a more active role on the housing market, which is known as post- neoliberalization. However, despite the claims of the national government to be making a ‘post-neoliberal’ turn with new national and regional housing policy, earlier conducted research fail to answer the question whether these new instruments actually represent a shift away from the neoliberal markets steering logic of recent decades. In order to fill in the existing gap between the limited academic research and the current situation about the role and cooperation of (semi-)government bodies at a regional scale, this research investigates the extent to which the Dutch regional housing market, with a focus on the Metropolitan Region Eindhoven (MRE), has shifted in a post-neoliberal direction in the 2020s. The main research question is: To what extent has the Dutch regional housing market, with a focus on the Metropolitan Region Eindhoven, developed in a post-neoliberal direction during the 2020s? To answer this question, three sub-questions were formulated that analyze: (1) how post-neoliberal housing policy can be defined, (2) how Dutch housing policy has changed in recent years, and (3) how these changes are reflected in regional housing outcomes. The research objectives were to examine recent national and regional housing policy developments and assess whether these represent a shift from neoliberal governance logics towards more publicly steered and socially oriented approaches.

The research applied a qualitative case study design, combining document analysis with nine semi-structured interviews with representatives of municipalities and housing corporations in the MRE. This empirical approach allowed for a detailed analysis of both policy discourse and implementation practices, as well as how actors perceive recent changes in housing governance. The document analysis showed that post-neoliberal housing policy is characterized by a renewed emphasis on affordability, decommodification and democratization (Kadi et al., 2021). Together with the paradigm-shift framework from Hall (1993), which provides a framework to identify a third order policy change, it formed the theoretical basis of this research.

The results show that the Dutch regional housing market, and specifically the MRE, is showing meaningful progress towards a post-neoliberal housing market. The combination of stronger national coordination, regional cooperation, and targeted efforts to improve affordability and democratization, highlights the effort of the (semi-)public sector to take a more active role on the housing market. However, the decades of neoliberalization prior to 2022 have led to several systematic barriers, such as legal constraints for housing corporations, limited municipal capacity, and the persistence of horizontal governance. Consequently, these barriers are hindering a full paradigm shift as described by Hall's (1993) third-order policy change. As such, the national government should focus on solving the manifests of their neoliberal housing policy of the past decades, which should give municipalities and housing corporations more legal and financial possibilities to fulfill the quantitative and qualitative housing ambitions and to reach a full paradigm shift.