The Possibilities for Local Housing System Analysis in Innovative Housing Policy Planning

In recent decades housing systems of European countries have been marked by increasing housing unaffordability, affecting ever-wider segments of the population.The recognition of this issue has led to policy reforms being recently initiated both at the Croatian national level and the EU level.In the current, initial stage, Croatian policymakers are exploring models of increasing the supply of limited-profit rental housing and developing active land policies to serve affordable housing provision, inspired by European best practice.Such models are innovative in the Croatian context, where direct public intervention in housing since the 1990s has mostly been limited to supporting homeownership, and the extensive implementation of such policies could potentially result in significant changes to the broader housing system.The article examines the potential for these changes using the theoretical perspective of housing systems, aimed at explaining the differences between national housing systems and their evolution over time.Given the expected high importance of the local level in planning future housing policies, the paper explores the possibilities of using this theoretical perspective for planning local housing policies.The concept of the housing provision chain is used as a methodological tool for analyzing housing systems, with the aim of identifying the interrelationships between the key components of housing production within a particular housing system: housing production, housing promotion, land supply, and tenure.The concept is recognized as a potentially valuable analytical basis for planning integrated local housing strategies.