'Affordable Housing'-Policies for a Post-COVID World: State of the Art, Complex Challenges and new Agendas

As part of the “Public Administration & Finance” course convened by Prof. Dr. Heike Grimm, Adjunct Research Fellow at the School of Social Sciences of the University of Western Australia and the coordinator of the Working group “Policy and Research” at the European Network for Housing, Dr. Steffen Wetzstein, joined the Brandt School Students in a Guest-Lecture on “Affordable Housing - Policies for a Post-COVID World: State of the Art, Complex Challenges and new Agendas”

The session turned Public Administration theories that the Brandt School students have been learning about during the course, into an empirically rich real-world case study. It explored affordable housing as a complex and structural challenge, different policies on housing and their evaluations, the principles for future-proof affordable housing, pandemic disruption and strategic agenda setting for housing in a post pandemic world. The session also touched on some of the notable roadblocks, resistances and risks in policy making on housing.

The discussion following Dr. Wetzstein’s lecture saw Brandt School Students making the most out of his presence among them and touched on multiple themes such as the Berlin Rent Ceiling and similar housing policy issues. Students were reflecting on questions such as re-asserting the basic need and social character of housing, financing affordable cities, building effecting dialogues between the “global north” and the “global south” in addition to ways residential housing can become a catalyst to bringing the people and the planet closer together.