Through the Roof: Housing, Capitalism, and the State in America and Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2025), Comparative Politics Series

Available now! To order a copy, please visit Cambridge University Press or Amazon. Watch

Housing is a defining issue of our time, driving a persistent affordability crisis, financial instability, and economic inequality. Through the Roof examines the crucial role of the state in shaping the housing markets of two economic powerhouses – the United States and Germany. The book starts with a puzzle: Free market America has vigorously supported homeownership markets with generous government programs, while social market Germany has slashed policy support for both homeownership and rental markets throughout the past century.

The book explains why both nations have adopted such radically different and unexpected housing policy approaches. Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews with policymakers, it argues that contrasting forms of capitalism – demand-led in the United States and export-oriented in Germany – resulted in divergent housing policies. In both countries, these policies have subsequently transformed capitalism itself.

Watch my book talk hosted by the American-German Institute (AGI) on November 12, 2025:

Alexander Reisenbichler was among the first political economists who studied
how the policies to promote homeownership sank rich North Atlantic economies
in the 2000s. He has now distilled his research into a fascinating account of
Germany and the U.S. that effectively defies stereotypes about the German
obsession with savings and the American obsession with free markets.

—Waltraud Schelkle, Professor, European University Institute

Reisenbichler’s exquisitely detailed argument surfaces and explains the
paradox that allegedly free-market America has, as Bourdieu would expect,
a housing market nearly totally shaped by the state, while corporatist Germany
has seen the state retreat from the housing market in the past twenty years.

—Mark Schwartz, Professor of Politics, University of Virginia

The U.S. created a housing crisis by turning housing into an asset class.
Germany did not make that mistake and yet ended up with a similar crisis.
Reisenbichler deftly explains both cases by reference to each country’s
underlying growth regime. A masterful political economy account that
shows us how growth, housing, and inequality are all interlinked.

—Mark Blyth, William R. Rhodes ’57 Professor of International Economics,
Brown University