Solving the housing issue of young people

According to many who deal with the issue of housing policy in Slovenia, there is no real strategy for dealing with housing. One of the experts is Professor Dr. Ivo Lavrač from the Faculty of Economics at the University of Ljubljana: “Slovenia does not yet have a real housing policy.” Therefore, Slovenia did not prepare any new strategies when it entered the post-socialist era, and the old strategies are increasingly being followed. Of all the Eastern European countries, Slovenia has reduced its rental stock the most. In 1990, there were 33% of rental apartments, and in 2011, only 9% (S. Mandič, Leaving for the First Independent Apartment, 2010 p. 21). According to sociologist Dr. Srna Mandič, who deals with housing issues, such a low percentage of rental apartments is the main reason for the increasingly late departure of young people from their parents. The thesis of the housing stock at that time was that the market would provide rental apartments. Due to the lack of taxation of real estate and the mistaken belief that the market will sort everything out, we have reached the current situation, which does not allow young people to rent affordable housing. In order to counteract this trend, the government established the Housing Fund in the past.

HOUSING FUND OF THE REPUBLIC OF SLOVENIA (SSRS)
SSRS is the central implementer of housing policy in Slovenia. The Fund is responsible for financing and promoting housing construction throughout the country. Its mission is also to deal with real estate with the aim of representing the public interest in the market. The Fund invests in the construction of housing and building land, promotes various forms of providing own and rented housing, provides long-term loans with a favorable interest rate to legal entities for the acquisition of non-profit rental housing and provides long-term loans with a favorable interest rate to individuals for the purchase of housing from the Fund. The most important task of the Fund is the construction of new housing, which the Fund has had difficulty fulfilling in recent years due to financial undernourishment. In the last ten years, the fund was planned to have an annual capital increase of 10 million euros, or 45 million euros in 2009, but only 10 million euros were spent. In 2000-09, the fund planned to build 22,000 non-profit and social apartments, but in fact 4,500 apartments were built. The residents of Ljubljana and Primorska, where the market price of apartments is the highest, have the most difficulty finding suitable housing. Since the housing fund built non-profit apartments in municipalities where the shortage of new apartments is not as acute as in Ljubljana, there has been considerable criticism of the fund’s operations.

Abroad, the housing issue is being addressed in a variety of ways. In Western European social welfare states, a large proportion of real estate is owned by a housing fund, which rents it out on a non-profit basis. For example, in the Netherlands, as much as 35% of real estate is owned by a housing fund. In Eastern European countries, however, this share is the lowest, such as in Hungary, where the housing fund rents out only 4% of all properties at a non-profit rent (source: C. Whitehead, K. Scanlon Social Housing Europe, LSE London, p:5).

The solution to the housing issue in Europe is very different, even the definition of social housing differs from country to country. Some countries solve this with housing owned by funds, while others have social housing owned by municipalities or other forms of state ownership. In larger countries, housing problems are solved by regions, and many countries have regulated social and market rents. In particular, socially highly developed countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands protect tenants from usurious market rents. On the other hand, there is the case of Germany, where the rental market is very developed and large and there is no need for price regulation, only their increase is regulated.