A/HRC/10/7 page 10 governments across the world. Accordingly, by the end of the 1990s, there was a worldwide shift “away from an emphasis on State economic management and service provision, to an ethos of ‘privatism’ in the provisioning and regulation of social and economic life”.25 A. The redefinition of the State’s role 23. When the acute misery of the urban poor began to be revealed by social reformers in Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth century, governments started to become active in the provision of housing assistance to individuals and households and to directly supply housing.26 This sort of intervention required large bureaucratic institutions and large public funds. In the United States, for example, as a result of the Great Depression, many homeowners couldn’t afford to make their monthly mortgage payments and this provoked foreclosure on a massive scale and the collapse of the entire housing industry. In response, the Roosevelt administration established programmes and institutions that “paved the way for the nation’s remarkable increase in homeownership from the 1940s to the 1960s and established a new stable system for housing finance that stood solid for more than 40 years”.27 The New Deal approach to housing included the building of cheap public housing for the poor and the creation of a Housing Authority which subsidized low rents for low-income families and granted long-term loans to local agencies that assumed part of the cost for slum clearance and public housing construction and maintenance.28 24. At the end of the Second World War, an appalling number of families and communities were homeless in Europe. The reconstruction of the cities and the construction of social housing saw rapid growth which continued in a sustained manner for at least two decades. By the end of the 1970s the demand for housing was relatively stable in the region and the costs of major public housing programmes continued to increase. With the slowdown of the economy in the late 1960s, the cost of the welfare state was increasingly viewed as an excessive drain on public finances. Critics began to argue that such policies were no longer fiscally or socially sustainable or necessary.29 25 G.W. Anderson, Constitutional Rights after Globalization (Oxford, Hart Publishing, 2005). 26 M. Harloe, The People’s Home: Social Rented Housing in Europe and America (Hoboken, Wiley-Blackwell, 1995). 27 A.F. Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States: An Introduction (London, CRC Press, 2006). 28 D.J. Russo, American History from a Global Perspective: An Interpretation (Praeger Publishers, 2000). 29 J. Dodson, Rolling the State: Government, Neoliberalism and Housing Assistance in Four Advanced Economies, research paper (Griffith University Urban Research Program, 2006).