Housing plays a special role in the social and political dialogue in most societies. It is a major component in creating stable and healthy communities and is often the largest single household expense. Housing can be a sector for stimulus of the national economy. But housing conditions are often seen to be worse than they should be, given the national standards of living and societal values. For these reasons, almost all societies intervene in housing markets through an array of policies and subsidies intended to stimulate housing production or consumption by various groups. Housing institutions and subsidy programs are developed in most countries in response to specific macro-economic or political situations but often remain in place long after the specific conditions they were meant to address ceased to be relevant. Generally, when new problems or frontiers in housing or housing finance require new subsidy approaches, additional programs are added. The housing subsidy and policy scene in many countries is, therefore, a complex tapestry of often contradictory subsidy programs, regulations, and tax measures, bewildering both policymakers and housing experts. Periodically, however, budgetary constraints, socially uncomfortable inequities in the housing conditions of different population groups1, and negative effects of subsidy programs on housing sector development put the reform of housing subsidy schemes on the political agenda in both emerging and (post) industrial economies.