International experience in rental housing public policies

Abstract

In Latin America, rent has appeared in various policies, presented at the recent International Seminar on Rental Housing in Latin America (2023), and in proposals supported, for example, by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). In Mexico, for example, the private housing supply model has resulted in the abandonment of 5 million units and much of it has been turned into rental housing. In Chile, after the mass production of villas, multifamily buildings emerged, owned by a single corporate owner. Countries in the Global North such as the Netherlands, France and the UK use public or private property with regulated or controlled prices. Social rental models are on the rise via partnerships with the private sector to produce and manage housing units, or agreements with landlords to offer their properties for affordable rent in exchange for tax breaks, urban incentives and even subsidies. Rent now occupies a central place in affordable housing policies. Two of them stand out: rent subsidy policies, through vouchers for poor families to find housing on the private or public market; and the policy of regulating rents in the private housing market - such as rent controlled or rent stabilised - which makes it possible to control rent increases, as well as offering tenants greater legal protection in their contractual relationship with the landlord. The challenges of these policies involve tackling housing as a commodity in the context of accumulation regimes based on the "dominance of the financial sphere", understanding it in the intertwining of the spheres of financialisation and the production of space. The general research objective of this project is to understand whether and how international public rental policies have set out to meet the challenge of the growing use of housing as a commodity, as a financial asset.The specific objective is to update the debate on research and international experiences of public housing policies involving rent, with a focus on Latin America, by building a panorama of policies, collaborating with inputs for the elaboration of the social rental policy in the Municipality of São Paulo. The products consist of: i) structuring and developing an International Seminar on renting and systematising its results; ii) a historical and theoretical review of rent and rental housing policies, based both on the results of previous seminars and on an analysis of federal, state and municipal policy designs in the country, as well as an analysis of international experiences implemented through a survey of relevant bibliography in international journals; iii) drawing up an overview of the social rent policies analysed using the Logical Model for public policy evaluation, adapted to the criteria for analysing rent policies; iv) production of analytical articles and technical notes aimed at reflecting guidelines for the design of social rental policy, taking into account the specificities of the production of space and regulation of urban land use in the city of São Paulo, oriented towards the four research axes of this investigation: production of new units (renovation, construction and acquisition); management (formulation, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of the programme), access (selection criteria and prioritisation of demand) and permanence (guarantee of continuity of the housing service and care for the target public); v) and also the consolidation of the results into Research Reports and inputs aimed at fostering social rental policy in the Municipality of São Paulo.