The Limits of Support: Housing Preference Formation in Denmark

• In Event: Home Is Where the City Is: Supporting, Defending, and Designing Urban Housing

Abstract

The housing affordability crisis has garnered considerable attention in recent years. Across advanced democracies, the growing costs of housing are increasingly locking the working and middle classes out of urban centers, increasing economic segregation, lowering overall economic prosperity, and fueling political discontent. Traditionally, many countries have tried to alleviate pressure in contested urban housing markets by providing social housing units at below-market rates. In recent years, however, the supply of these units has been unable to keep up with rising demands. As a result, governments increasingly use targeted approaches in defining eligibility, even in previously universalist systems of social housing provision. While these interventions ensure that the most vulnerable subsections of the populations continue to have access to housing at below-market rents, they decrease the ability of social housing to facilitate social mixing, another important outcome of social housing provision. In addition, the changing composition of the eligible target population, especially in the context of tightening rental markets overall, is likely to affect public support. In the context of a continuing housing affordability crisis across different national contexts, questions of how contestations over limited housing supply play out between groups, and how this in turn informs public opinion on the government provision of public goods, is increasingly relevant. By leveraging an experimental survey research design, this project analyzes how the composition of the defined target population shapes support for social housing and housing development more broadly in Denmark. The Danish case allows for an examination of political contestation over the policy response to a tightening housing supply in a context characterized by robust levels of public support for social housing as a public good. The experimental design allows me to consider the effect of multidimensional characteristics, including recipients’ citizenship status, race, age, income, need, and household size, on expressed policy support. This article contributes both theoretically and empirically to our understanding of the politics of housing policy in advanced democracies. This project sheds light on how individuals form preferences for inclusive housing policies, and how out-group characteristics and perceptions of deservingness shape these dynamics. Moreover, the study illustrates how governments can increase the political feasibility of public interventions into the housing market, and potential obstacles limiting local policymakers’ ability to solve a key societal problem, the scarcity of housing.

Author

• Laura Kettel, Aarhus University