Why do some countries have lots of social housing and others little?

This nine-storey building is nearly a kilometre long and was put up in the early 1980s to house 4,500 people.  

That, in a single block, is about the same size of community that was in all the giant slabs and towers of Glasgow’s Red Road, the Scottish flats once routinely but wrongly described as Europe’s tallest.

Il Serpentone and a few of its outbuildings, such as a now largely abandoned shopping precinct and outdoor amphitheatre, is officially called Nuovo Corviale. 

Il Serpentone (Image: David Leask / Herald)

Unlike the Red Road and many other brutalist British council housing developments of the 1960s and 1970s and later, it still stands, albeit close to illegal rubbish dumping grounds. 

It has residents willing to fight for their homes. And artists eager to transform them. Somebody has even come up with a name for the movement of muralists brightening up the grey masse: Corvialismo.

Sometimes social housing in the rest of Europe feels familiar, feels Scottish, British. The Big Snake certainly does. Some of its landings, corridors and stairwells feel loved, with pot plants outside doors, and bright wall paintings. Others, well, not so much. This is what most of us would call a council scheme.

But the passing similarities of one development or another disguise a bigger picture: social housing varies dramatically across Europe.

Take Italy, home of Nuovo Corviale. Just 3.5% of the entire housing stock is socially rented, according to Housing Europe’s annual review. That compares with 23% in Scotland, as of 2022. More than three-quarters of Italian homes are owner-occupied. Here the figure is 61%.

Numbers like these matter. It means there are fewer places for poor people to live, at least anywhere close to work.

As of 2021, an estimated 96,000 people Italy had no fixed abode, according to an independent Italian website called Openpolis which collates, curates and publishes official data.  Of these almost 13,000 were under 18, 38% of them foreign or stateless.  

There are cheap houses, just not where there are jobs.

READ MORE: 

• Disabled mother's five-year ordeal on council flat wait list

• Living Rent: Housing crisis is a 'national disgrace'

• Mother's battle to stay on remote Scottish island

Some Italian villages face a depopulation crisis far more grave than anything seen in Scotland in modern times. Homes - usually as a gimmick to attract investors - can go for a euro. 

But in big inner cities, like Rome, affordable flats to rent or buy are impossible to find. In Trastevere, the storied working-class neighbourhood across the Tiber from the eternal city’s centre, hundreds of homes are now AirBNBs. With no social housing,  45% of residents have left the community in the last decade, The Times reported this week.

Remaining residents are getting so mad with noisy tourists in their streets they have started shouting at them to shut up from their windows.

Ironically, landlord lobbies argue that legal protections for long-term renters mean it is more lucrative to stick to short-term holiday lets.

So why the big differences? Why do some countries - such as Scotland - have lots of social housing - and others very little?

Well, history. Italy did build some cheap rented homes in its boom years after World War Two. But not nearly as many as Britain 

We know what happened here.  Scottish local authorities built homes for most us.

In 1981 just over half of all Scots lived in a council house. That was shortly after the Conservative Government of Margaret Thatcher decided to create a “property-owing democracy.”

By the end of the the 1980s private homes had replaced council ones as the most common tenure in the country, according to historic data from the Scottish Government’s national housing survey.

Half a million council homes were to be sold, according to a tally by Shelter, the homelessness charity. Now 40 or so per cent of them are believed to be in the hands of private landlords.

Scotland’s privatisation of its public housing was followed a decade or so later by very similar but more dramatic processes in much of central and eastern Europe.  

But in the old Socialist bloc more former state, municipal or other public housing tends still to be in owned by occupiers, rather than rentiers.

Former Communist Slovenia, for example, has a far higher level of owner occupation than Scotland or Italy, at 79% of total stock. Only 5% of homes are socially rented, reports Housing Europe.

A mural in Rome (Image: David Leask/Herald)

Spain and Portugal have very different modern histories. The far-right dictatorships they experienced through the middle of the century did not build affordable homes for rent. Even now only 3.3% of Spain’s housing stock is social. 

There are attempts to shift this figure up. In Barcelona, Catalonia - where holiday lets have also squeezed out renters - local authorities are investing in new social housing.  

Mayor Ada Colau - initially a campaigner against evictions - has a ten-year plan to double the number of council houses in the city as part of a housing programme that includes rent controls and a crackdown on AirBNBs. Her city is not just building houses - it is buying them, whole blocks.

Travel north and there tends to be far more social housing, more even than in Scotland. The Netherlands has 29% of its homes rented out socially, more than in Scotland. 

This - unusually - means that affordable rented homes are not seen as a safety net for the very poorest, but as a mainstream housing option.  Which, in turns, makes social housing schemes feel less like ghettoes for the poor.

However, there is still huge pressure on the social housing system. House prices  and private rents in the Netherlands are very high - a new home in Amsterdam is typically 10 times the average annual income. The average wait for a socially rented home in the Netherlands is seven years, The Guardian reported last year. That rises is to 18 or 19 in Amsterdam.

One Dutch solution has been to put up what they call startblokken, tiny flats for refugees and young locals, some made from disused shipping containers.

In Austria, 24% of homes are socially, rented, slightly more than here. Only 49% are owner occupied. 

In France, the country that might argue it invested low rent homes for the poor, it is 17% social, 57% owner-occupied. 

But there is still a lot of stigma about what most French people call "banlieues” - suburbs dominated by low rent homes, often called HLM, the abbreviation for “moderate-rent housing”, which can be private or public. In theory, French cities have a legal target for a fifth of their homes to be HLM.

In Sweden, according to the latest snapshot from Housing Europe, only 40% of homes are owner occupied. 

The building block known as Il Serpentone (Image: David Leask/Herald)

Sixteen per cent is publicly rented. Another 24% is cooperative, that is when residents own a proportion of a building and become “tenant-owners”. Crucially, co-op residents cannot sublet without special permission. In Denmark, 20% of housing is “non-profit” rented and another seven per cent is cooperative. 

Germany - as is so often -  the case stands out. Only 44% of its homes are owner-occupied. But just four per cent are social. The country, unusually in Europe, has a majority of its houses and flats rented out privately.

Across the continent - in countries with a tradition of social housing and those without - there is an emerging consensus of building communities with mixed tenure rather than warehousing the poor in giant developments like The Red Road or Il Serpentone.

The sheer scale of the Roman building is impressive. But it was part of an even grander project, known by its Italian acronym Peep. Back in the 1960s local authorities planned to put up 700,000 flats in 74 developments across the capital. Nuovo Corviale was Number 61. 

This building may be huge. But the community campaign to make it fit for tenants is not grand or sweeping. It is very much incremental, on a human scale. 

Until recently there had still be talk of bulldozing the entire structure, replacing it with low-rise housing. Instead, vast sums are being spent upgrading existing homes, including a ten-million-euro “Green Kilometre” project to refurbish and entire corridor of flats that is, yes, as long as the name suggests.

Housing officials and academics from around the world are taking an interest. Is there still a future for giant grey housing schemes?

The murals of Corvialismo, explained one of their champions, local Emmanuele Del Gatto are more than just a “graphic project, or a logo”. Speaking to online arts and culture magazine Lucy, he explained. “They are a demand, that the time for being ashamed of Il Serpentone is over.”