The field of housing over the last decades has been dominated by a politics accommodating and enabling market forces, taking the shape of housing liberalization and commodification. However, in the face of increasing housing unaffordability, unavailability and wider precarities, a political turn towards market-constraining housing policies can be identified across countries. These include, for example, the introduction of more stringent rent controls and tenant protections. In this paper we turn to a comparative analysis of three countries that, while representing different welfare and housing regime contexts, have made such a turn towards (re-)regulation: Ireland, the Netherlands and Portugal. Our empirical aims are threefold. First, we unravel commonalities and differences in drivers of the changing housing-political landscape. Second, we assess the forms and instruments of these transformations. Third, we discuss the political limits to these transformations, emphasizing their typically partial and contradictory nature. Conceptually, our paper contributes to discussions around post-neoliberal housing politics, showing how these politics seek to break with but also relate to preceding housing politics.

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