SOCIAL SECURITY, SOCIAL INEQUALITY 207
was hoped, and not enough to guarantee the reproduction of the parent
generation.
At the beginning of the 1970s, the SED leadership also launched a
large-scale construction program to deal with the massive housing short-
age and the enormous need to overhaul its existing housing, much of
which was very outdated. The plan was to be able to provide 3.5 million
apartments within two decades, including renovated older housing. But it
took a bit of creative math in order to achieve this lofty goal. Nevertheless,
the regime did increase the volume of new construction considerably for
over a decade to over a hundred thousand apartments per year before
construction began to wane again in the second half of the 1980s. Al-
though the limited resources available were primarily put to use in a few
development zones, which increased the disparities between the crum-
bling older buildings of the inner cities and new neighborhoods, this am-
bitious housing construction scheme became the second “attractive core
of social policy during the Honecker era” from the people’s point of view.^37
These housing policy initiatives were part of a shift in social policy
“from a growth-oriented paradigm of progress to a security-oriented
paradigm of consolidation.” This same shift was also detected in strate-
gies designed to secure the power of the state in other socialist countries
around 1970.^38 Consumer policy played a key role in steering this new
course. Between 1971 and 1986/87, the percentage of state subsidies on
consumption-related spending (not including rent for housing) climbed
from 10 to over 26 percent. Without this artifi cial price capping, con-
sumers would have had to pay almost double for food items during the
late phase of the GDR.^39 For the East German population, these social
and consumer policy initiatives during the Honecker era signaled a no-
ticeable change in the temporal framework of SED politics: rather than
pursuing a long-range vision of a communist society, the SED leadership
promised that social energy would be channeled more heavily into fulfi ll-
ing current consumer expectations. In doing so, the SED abandoned the
promises of a social utopia that it had relied on to legitimize its social pol-
icy up to that point, but it countered this loss by increasing what it could
concretely off er GDR consumers. Consumption thus became part of a
new social contract—under the motto of “real existing socialism”—that
tied the reassertion of party rule, a more centralized planned economy,
and increased preventative surveillance of the population to the promise
of a noticeably improved standard of life for GDR citizens.^40
Honecker was the driving force behind this swing in the government’s
policy on consumption, which was pushed through despite reservations
voiced by economic experts. Economists pointed to the lack of economic
resources and to the negative eff ects that state’s increase in subsidies