The effects of market-based housing reforms on housing affordability: New York 1990-2008 By Justin Kadi Published online on Openpop.org, a collaborative blog by the University of Oxford as a joint enterprise between the Department of Social Policy and Intervention and the Department of Sociology. Article available online at: http://www.openpop.org/?p=1377 Since the 1980s, policies have increasingly encouraged housing provision by the private market. Programs to de-commodify housing such as rent regulations or social housing programs have gradually been terminated and replaced by policies to promote the delivery of housing through profit-making actors. Selling or demolishing social housing, liberalizing rents, or promoting homeownership have come to dominate the policy landscape, not just in Britain or the US, but also across many Western European countries. Programs such as the British Right-To-Buy, HOPE VI in the US, or the Dutch urban restructuring program are widely known, if only exemplary of this wider trend. While political elites and free market advocates often claim market-based housing reforms to provide ‘general’ benefits and the basis for a ‘better functioning’ housing market, critical social science has pointed to the unequal effects that the promotion of private market housing can have. Relevant reforms might open up lucrative opportunities for capital accumulation in housing markets, but similarly undermine the ability of poor households to afford housing, particularly in attractive locations with high demand (Hodkinson, Watt & Mooney, 2013). Systematic empirical evidence on the effects of market-based reforms on housing conditions has so far, however, remained surprisingly scarce. Gentrification research has given the first hints as to how the promotion of market principles heightens housing cost pressure on poor households and contributes to displacement from inner-city neighborhoods (Wyly et al., 2010). Our research takes this one step further by examining how market-based reforms have affected housing affordability on a city-wide scale and how this played out for different income groups. New York City served as our research laboratory. We used the Housing and Vacancy Survey, a triennial public survey that covers housing and household characteristics. While the city’s housing market has historically been dominated by private market actors and a powerful real estate lobby, from the 1950s onwards, a number of redistributive programs have de-coupled housing, at least to a certain extent, from private market forces. New York developed a comparatively large and well-maintained public housing stock – by far the largest of all US cities –, relatively strict rent regulation in parts of the private rental market, as well as several subsidy programs to dampen rent levels in privately provided units. Certainly, these programs were far from able to “solve” the city’s long-standing housing crisis and New York has remained a city