Housing institutions and the durable structures of housing are often subject to long-term processes of decade- or even century-long incremental change. Nevertheless, housing studies have largely focused either on static analysis in the form of single case or comparative snapshots of policies, or, more recently, on the inertia of institutional path dependence, while processes of incremental change have been almost entirely neglected. Social scientists like Wolfgang Streeck, Kathleen Thelen and James Mahoney have proposed a typology of patterns of incremental institutional change, and this paper explores the applicability of this typology to housing provision. This is done, more specifically, by analyzing two dominant processes of gradual change in recent decades: the slow but steady rise in homeownership and the gradual decline of public and social housing, taking as country cases the comparatively static and path dependent housing regimes of Germany and Sweden. The typology is found helpful for analyzing the different processes being at work in both countries. We conclude with some critical observations on how to analyze gradual change in housing.