Housing Affordability as a Planning Problem : Planners and the Framing of Affordability in Helsinki, Hamburg, and Copenhagen

Spatial planners typically see themselves as controlling and reining other actors within the planning field, often by selecting and justifying the direction for plans (Forrester 1980). The goals planners set are often framed as value-neutral (North et al., 2017), although planners themselves may be influenced by their own class-specific value system (Liao et al. 2019). Copenhagen, Hamburg and Helsinki aim to become “inclusive”, cities that can “enable all the citizens to remain in their city. One of the critical issues identified to reach this goal is the supply of affordable housing. Planners identify affordability as one of the main crises that planners need to tackle. They seek to do so foremost by social mixing policies, and in particular by fostering the development of social housing. Nevertheless, from a housing affordability research perspective, viewing the affordability crises merely as a planning issues seems shortsighted (see for example Ryan Collins 2018). Therefor this paper turns to the housing issue, and asks: 1) How do planners frame the housing affordability crises? Do they understand housing as a consumption good or an investment product? 2) What knowledge are the values and beliefs built on? and, 3) How do these values shape the outcome of the planning goals? As data, the paper uses semi-structured interviews with planners and the comprehensive plans of the cities. Through the empirical data, the study aims to grasp what is valid knowledge about the affordability crises, how this knowledge has arisen and how it is passed on and what consequences it has for the overall shaping of the “inclusive city for all”. The preliminary results indicate that planners do not fully grasp the political economic framework of housing affordability, nor the role of landrent in housing price formation, which leaves planners to merely adapt to the affordability crises rather than to react to it.