The comparative study of housing decommodification lags behind classical welfare state research, while housing research itself is rich in homeownership studies but lacks comparative accounts of private and social rentals due to missing comparative data. Building on existing works and various primary sources, this study presents a new collection of up to forty-eight countries’ social housing shares in stock and new construction since the first housing laws around 1900. The interpolated benchmark time series generally describes the rise and fall of social housing across a residual, a socialist, and a Northern-European housing group. The decline was steeper than for the classical welfare state, but the degree of erosion was surprisingly small in some countries where public housing associations remained resilient. Within the broader housing welfare state, social housing correlates positively with rent regulation and allowances, but negatively with homeownership subsidies and liberal mortgage regulation. A multivariate analysis shows that social housing is rather explained by housing shortages and complementarities with rental and welfare policies than by typical welfare state theories (GDP, political parties). Generally, the paper shows that conventional housing typologies are difficult to defend over time and argues more generally for including housing decommodification in welfare state research.

Under post-welfarist realignments in neoliberal democracies, the provision of welfare is increasingly conditional on claimants fulfilling certain (behavioural) obligations. Under these shifts, an increased focus on the cultural dimensions of conduct and belonging redefines the basis for citizenship and extends the risk of subversion to include incivility or cultural difference. Critically, this recasting of the state-citizen social contract occurs with potentially exclusionary effects by legitimising ethnic and culturalist explanations that attribute blame to individuals/groups based on their perceived failure to follow normative models of social and spatial integration. The significance of these neoliberal welfare shifts for many of those most at risk of exclusion—black and minority ethnics (BME) and indigenous populations—has received little attention. Responding to this gap from within housing studies, this article reports on qualitative research on the fulfillment of government responsibilities for tenancy support provision under reforms to Indigenous housing welfare in Australia. Based on interviews with Indigenous housing stakeholders, it identifies programmatic, organisational and operational issues hampering tenant support provision that challenge how the ideal of ‘fair reciprocity’ was satisfied at the outset of the reforms. Given contemporary policy discourse on community cohesion and integration, the ways in which current programmatic oversights signal this neoliberal programme and its attempts to reinforce perceptions and constructions of cultural difference to politicise and pathologise the behaviours of particular individuals and communities is significant. Key questions arise about how the needs of minority groups might inform the types of ‘opportunities’ required to achieve the conditions for fair reciprocity within the contractual welfare state.