You Made Your Bed, Now Sleep In It – The Path-dependent Role of Civil Society Organizations in Local Housing Policy

Housing policy has recently regained attention among policy-makers and researchers. Especially growing cities are increasingly confronted with a dearth of affordable housing and rising social inequalities. Their responses to these common problems are very much shaped by the traditions and structures of social and economic policies. The paper will demonstrate these local approaches as part of wider welfare state arrangements, focusing on two growing cities, Vienna and Washington, DC. It will focus on the role of civil society organizations within these structures, showing how CSOs in Washington have traditionally had a lot of elbow-room for independent action while having to finance their activities largely by themselves. In Vienna, on the other hand, Genossenschaften (housing cooperatives) as well as other CSOs have been strongly interlinked with the local government in terms of funding and regulation. While this provides security, it also limits their possible activities. The proposed paper is part of a dissertation project comparing housing and urban development policies and assessing their influence on the two cities. The policy analysis undertaken for this purpose and the 12 semi-structured interviews per case study will be used to determine the role of civil society organizations in the local housing regimes. Based on these findings, the paper aims at carving out the potential of the cities in reacting to their current challenges and the contributions CSOs are likely to make.