Outcome Contracts and Partnerships: Public and Private Duties for an Emerging Customary Housing Law

This article explores emerging trends in housing law and policy, with a particular focus on the European Union. In response to the persistent housing crisis and the limitations of both state-led interventions and market-driven models, the authors argue for a fundamental reconceptualization of housing not only as the object of a fundamental right, but also as a shared private duty to be enforced through outcome-based contractual and financial instruments. Through case studies from the European Investment Bank strategies on housing and practices developed at a local level in EU cities, the analysis highlights converging developments that suggest introducing binding social obligations for private actors in financing and contractual schemes and as part of the social impact to be produced enlarge the number and typologies of parties in contracts and partnerships involving social and community parties in co-developing housing projects. The article concludes by investigating the possibility that Public-Private-Community Partnerships (PPCPs) might be used as a scalable contractual form capable of institutionalizing such social duties and multi-party or multilateral contracts. Finally, drawing on Lon Fuller’s theory of customary law and Sarah Swan’s conception of municipal public duties, the article suggests that financing practices and housing policies based on outcome and co-governance spreading across different EU Member States may give rise to a transnational customary law of housing and PPCPs may provide the foundations for a new legal grammar of housing justice.414