Housing restitution policies among post-socialist countries: explaining divergence

The purpose of this paper is to explain why post-socialist countries adopted different housing restitution strategies after the change of regimes across the region. Restitution refers here to the process of returning property or compensating for property expropriated by the communist regime to its previous owners or their descendants. This paper provides a brief overview, assessment and categorisation of housing property restitution policies using a sample of 14 post-socialist countries, but it primarily aims to contribute to the general understanding of the evolution of post-socialist housing systems. The authors demonstrate that the decision of governments whether or not to adopt a policy of mass give-away privatisation of public housing probably had the biggest impact on which property restitution strategy, if any, was applied.