Housing plays an important role in the development of welfare policies and also often in achieving sustainability goals. There exists, however, implementation gaps between policies and practices in urban development and housing. Here it should be possible to draw lessons from policy implementations in the past. In this article we explore the strategies of the Swedish central government in imple...

The growing awareness of housing problems Ten years ago it was possible, and even fashionable, for local officials and civic leaders in American cities to deny the existence of slums or other basic housing problems in their communities. Today the shortage of housing is known to every school child, and most cities possess both emergency and long-term machinery for housing betterment. The past de...

Secondhand smoke and thirdhand smoke (e.g., smoke residues found on walls and floors) are known to pose health hazards. Some landlords and cities have therefore established smoke-free policies for multiunit housing. The military is in effect the largest landlord in the United States, with approximately 630,000 units of housing. We reviewed the service-level tobacco control policies of the Army,...

There exists a disconnection between evolving policies in the policy arenas of mental health, housing, and income support in Canada. One of the complexities associated with analysing the intersection of these policies is that federal, provincial, and municipal level policies are involved. Canada is one of the few developed countries without a national mental health policy and because of the fed...

Recent years have witnessed the increasing popularity of housing allowance as a major housing policy in countries across the world. However, the research on behavior impacts of housing benefits is still in paucity. In this paper, we present a tentative attempt to investigate an issue that not explored before: does higher level of welfare reliance on housing allowance promote or depress recipien...

A central principle underlying government policy is to help people maintain their independence in their own homes for as long as possible. In particular, there has been a long-standing policy to reduce admissions to care homes. Extra care housing is a development of sheltered housing that aims to meet the housing, care and support needs of older people, while helping them to maintain their inde...

In 2004, the Western Australian state government announced and implemented policy incentives for first-home buyers in the form of either total conveyance duty (stamp duty) exemptions or significant reductions for specified price bands of housing. This paper analyses the impact of this policy on demand in the Perth housing market. Results confirm an immediate and significant impact on demand in ...

The most significant and most expensive housing policy in the United States is the treatment of owner-occupied housing for tax purposes. This treatment of housing under the tax code is analogous to that in many other countries (for example, Sweden), but certainly not in all developed countries (for example, Canada). Federal subsidies to US renter households are much smaller. Policy has evolved ...

Although the hazards of exposure to tobacco smoke are well established, and laws mandating smoke-free indoor air are widespread, private homes have long been considered spaces beyond the legitimate reach of regulation. Reflecting this view, the federal government has not required public-housing units to be smoke-free. Historically, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has maint...