A/67/286 assistance from international organizations greatly influenced the development of market-based housing finance and boosted housing market activity in developing countries. 5 Despite some diversity in housing policy experience, most countries opted for promoting housing markets and individual homeownership, privatizing social housing programmes and deregulating housing finance markets. 5. In some countries, selling publicly owned houses to tenants has been seen as a way to increase homeownership while diminishing State expenditure. 6 Privatization was also supported by increased stigmatization of public housing as centres of extreme poverty, crime and segregation. In Europe and North America, the privatization of public housing has taken various forms, including the sale to sitting tenants of public rented housing through right-to-buy policies (e.g. the United Kingdom), property transfers to not-for-profit actors (e.g. the Netherlands) and, in some cases, to profitmaximizing actors (e.g. Germany 7 and the United States of America 8). 6. During the 1990s, most formerly planned economies also embarked on projects of large-scale privatization of public housing through “right to buy” programmes, resulting, in some cases, in the almost complete eradication of public housing. In most countries, 9 this process led to radical changes in tenure structure; in many formerly planned economies owner-occupied housing now forms more than 90 per cent of the housing stock (e.g. 96 per cent in Estonia, 77 per cent in Slovenia 10 and more than 80 per cent in China). 7. Even in countries where massive privatization did not take place, the ideological transfer of responsibility for provision of housing to the market has been accompanied by the view that homeownership is the best tenure option, to be placed at the centre of all housing policies. This process has overshadowed other wellestablished or alternative tenures, such as rental housing (public and private) and different forms of cooperative and collective ownership, among others. 11 Consequently, since the end of the Second World War homeownership rates have been constantly climbing 12 and by mid-2000 had reached more than 50 per cent in __________________ 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 4 ECE, Housing Finance Systems for Countries in Transition, p. 7; World Bank, The Emerging Role of Housing Finance (Washington, D.C., 1988). United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), Affordable Land and Housing in Europe and North America (Nairobi, 2011), p. 9. K. Scanlon and C. Whitehead, “Le logement social en Europe: tendances communes et diversités persistantes”, in C. Lévy-Vroelant and C. Tutin, eds., Le logement social en Europe au début du XXIe siècle: la revision générale (Rennes, France, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010), p. 24. In the United States, the Housing and Community and Development Act of 1974 ended most new construction of public housing and initiated the Housing Choice Voucher Program (Section 8), shifting funds from public housing authorities to the private sector, which was to construct low-income housing. These “affordable” houses were eventually too costly for many public housing tenants (A/HRC/13/20/Add.4, paras. 10, and 25). Only a few countries did not adopt the “right to buy” for tenants (e.g. the Czech Republic and Poland). Replies from Estonia and Slovenia to the questionnaire sent by the Special Rapporteur to Member States on 5 April 2012 (hereafter “the questionnaire”) . Julie Lawson, Tony Gilmour and Vivienne Milligan, International Measures to Channel Investment towards Affordable Rental Housing (Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, 2010); Fée, p. 80. Mikael Atterhög and Han-Suck Song, “A Survey of Policies that May Increase Access to Home Ownership for Low-Income Households”, Housing Theory and Society, vol. 26, No. 4 (2009), pp. 248-249. 12-45918