Evaluating Housing Policies

Whatever the explicit or implicit aims of policy, and whatever processes of implementation are involved, the assessment of the outputs of policy are important. In the literature on social policy, evaluations have focused on the distributional impacts of policies on who benefits and who loses and on how these patterns of benefit relate to stated objectives and the language employed to justify policies. Who benefits and who loses as a result of policy not only indicates whether the objectives of the policy concerned are being met. Evaluation of policy also involves consideration of whether there are other unintentional consequences of policy, whether there are wider effects of policy which bring the policy concerned into conflict with other policies and objectives. Furthermore housing policies characteristically involve a multiplicity of objectives. As was argued in Chapter 11, these objectives are often in conflict.