Kommunen som boligeier

This report describes a project carried out by the social research institutes NOVA and Fafo on behalf of the Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development (KRD). The Ministrys prime concern was to document routines and metodes applied by local authorities in managing the public rental housing sector; mainly the routines applied during the phase of alloting public housing, and the routines applied in case of tenants breaching the rental contract by not paying the rent in due time. A second concern of the Ministry was – on the basis of the established «routine structure» in the municipalities – to value the degree of concordance of the revealed routines with routines in line with customes of good management. The data of the study was gathered through a net-based questionnaire from a sample of 118 municipalities drawn from the universe of municipalities with more than 5 000 inhabitants. We obtained responses from about 70 per cent of the total sample. Norway has a small public rental housing sector; it counts for about 4 per cent of the total number of dwellings, and for about 16 per cent of the total number of rented dwellings. Most of the public renting is means-tested and restricted to people disadvantaged on the housing market. As to the quality of the management routines, theese are some of the most importent items; if, and how, people are oriented about the criteria for beeing alloted public dwellings; if, and how, applicants are informed about their rights as applicants (for instance the right to a written answer and the right to complain); if the applicants are offered only one dwelling or given the right to choose. In the study we find great variation between the municipalities. The largest municipalities have a practice most in line with customs of good management. Concerning contract breaching our study has been focusing mainly on two items; the cooperation between different municipal departments in order to prevent tenants from beeing evicted due to not having paied the rent, and the existence of routines for following up and helping those evicted to prevent them from beeing homeless. The findings on this area are in concordance with the findings mentioned above. The largest municipalities generally have the «best practice» when it comes to managing of the public housing rental sector. This may partly be explained by the fact that they also have the largest public housing sector and the largest number of (potential) tenants, and partly by the fact that they also normally have the largest and most profesional public administration