STATE HOUSING POLICY: EUROPEAN FUNDING PRACTICES AND REALITIES OF UKRAINE

Abstract

The problem of citizen housing providing as a key prerequisite for sustainable development of Ukrainian cities has become especially relevant in the last decade, given a number of factors and objective circumstances. Such circumstances include both the global trend of urbanization and the challenges of today, which are the result of military aggression in the east of the country and the COVID-19 pandemic. All this raises the question of the need to intensify the state housing policy and finding non-standard models and additional reserves and funding sources for housing construction in Ukraine. The authors analysed the main approaches of European countries in the field of social housing. The existence of national peculiarities of the implementation of the state housing policy has been established, as well as the common features of the relevant public service provision by the governments of the EU member states to their citizens have been determined. The authors found that European countries, as a result of a long evolutionary path of development, mostly rely on the model of social housing sector support, which provides subsidies to both the developer during the construction of such housing and the citizens who find themselves in difficult circumstances. At the same time, social housing for the needy is not sold, but rented on preferential terms. The authors of the article on the basis of the Ukraine legislation analysis, according to the results of the proposed funding schemes effect assessment of social housing construction identified the main areas of optimization and further research. It is clearly illustrated that one of the ways to ensure the availability of such housing for those who need it is to reduce the cost of construction through the use of tax privilege for housing cooperatives, the benefits of small business taxation preferences and innovative methods of combining original organizational legal forms of doing business in combination with the use of modern financial instruments, such as derivatives.