Vietnam’s Post-reform Housing Policies : Social Rhetoric, Market Imperatives and Informality

Following the economic reform (Doi moi), Vietnam’s housing sector has undergone comprehensive reform to create a housing market and encourage private sector’s housing production. The reform has brought about a vibrant housing market and an impressive growth of the housing stock. However, Vietnam’s housing development involves a paradox: the state-supported, corporate-led formal sector produced only a small share of urban housing while a hardly-acknowledge informal sector provided the majority of the urban housing stock. This paper analyses Vietnam’s housing policies to explore this paradox. It highlights the complex state-market relation and raises questions regarding policies towards small-scale actors and the role they play in housing development. Following the economic reform (Doi moi), Vietnam’s housing sector has undergone comprehensive reform to create a housing market and encourage private sector’s housing production. Housing reform has brought about a vibrant housing development scene and an impressive growth of the housing stock. Similar to many developing states in Asia and around the world, marketization has clearly led to a rise in corporate invested, commercial housing in Vietnam. However, what is notable for Vietnam’s housing sector is the predominant of the informal housing production. The development of Vietnamese housing sector can be seen to involve a paradox: On the one hand, we have a formal housing sector dominated by corporate actors that get major legal and financial support from the state but produced only a small share of urban housing. On the other, we have a large informal sector that was hardly acknowledged but provide the majority (75%) of housing in the urban areas. It is also the informal sector that provides a range of affordable housing options for the urban poor