The Reagan and Thatcher records suggest that particular features of housing make it a fragile part of the welfare state. At the start of the 1980s, Britain and the United States had radically different housing policies, but both have proven vulnerable to retrenchment. In each case, housing programs benefiting low- and moderate-income families have been cut, targeted more sharply on the very poor, and redesigned to rely more heavily on private markets. Because the public role in housing was far greater at the outset in Britain, changes there have been particularly dramatic.

Housing's vulnerability stemmed partly from the inability of supporters to develop coherent rationales for public programs once absolute shortages of decent housing had been largely overcome. The existence of a highly popular private alternative, owner occupation, makes public programs appear inferior, and, for most of the electorate, irrelevant. Because massive subsidies to owner-occupiers are channeled almost invisibly through the tax system (largely through the mortgage-interest deduction), private housing seems more efficient than public programs financed through on-budget spending. Nevertheless, weaknesses in the rationales for public low-income housing programs cannot provide the whole answer. Indeed, mounting problems of housing affordability and the striking increase in homelessness in both countries during the 1980s could easily have suggested the need for more, rather than less, government intervention.