Governments in a wide range of contexts have long pursued policies of social mixing to disperse poverty concentrations, attract middle class residents, and manage disadvantaged neighborhoods. Drawing on longitudinal and spatial housing data for the case of Amsterdam, this paper shows that the dominant instruments to facilitate social mixing have changed over time. Policy focus has shifted from large-scale urban renewal projects and the demolition of social rental housing to the sale of existing social rental dwellings. The changing nature of tenure restructuring also brings about a changing geography: while urban renewal was mostly concentrated in post-war neighborhoods of socio-economic decline, social housing sales are increasingly concentrated in inner city neighborhoods where already existing gentrification processes are amplified. These shifts need to be considered within their wider policy context. Local policies increasingly focus on catering to the preferences of middle class households, while welfare state restructuring and national austerity measures push policies that cut back on social rental housing. Thus, this paper demonstrates that the demise of social rent has accelerated under conditions of market-oriented housing restructuring, and increasingly occurs in high demand neighborhoods where current housing policies push gentrification.

Housing policies form a key instrument for steering urban development. Across contexts, homeownership is ideologically pushed as the “superior” tenure form (Ronald 2008), as it is assumed to have a positive influence on individual homeowners and society at large. At the urban or neighborhood level, homeownership is also expanded to address a plethora of issues. These issues include social and physical neighborhood problems, the economic strength of cities, and the provision of housing and urban milieus attractive to middle class residents. Tenure mixing policies typically entail the introduction of more expensive owner occupied dwellings and more affluent residents to targeted neighborhoods, frequently at the cost of affordable rental housing for lower income tenants. These policies may therefore be considered part of state-led gentrification (Smith 2002; Uitermark, Duyvendak, and Kleinhans 2007; Lees 2008; Bridge, Butler, and Lees 2012). State policies may amplify already existing gentrification processes, or alternatively seek to spark gentrification in disadvantaged neighborhoods.