This could work elsewhere too…
Helsinki owns 60,000 social housing units; one in seven residents live in city-owned housing. It also owns 70% of the land within the city limits, runs its own construction company, and has a current target of building 7,000 more new homes – of all categories – a year.
In each new district, the city maintains a strict housing mix to limit social segregation: 25% social housing, 30% subsidised purchase, and 45% private sector. Helsinki also insists on no visible external differences between private and public housing stock, and sets no maximum income ceiling on its social housing tenants.
It has invested heavily, too, in homelessness prevention, setting up special teams to advise and help tenants in danger of losing their homes and halving the number of evictions from city-owned and social housing from 2008 to 2016.
“We own much of the land, we have a zoning monopoly, we run our own construction company,” says Riikka Karjalainen, senior planning officer. “That helped a lot with Housing First because simply, there is no way you will eradicate homelessness without a serious, big-picture housing policy.”
But of course, you can see the problem. Unlike most cities elsewhere, Helsinki hasn’t sold off the land under it. It shouldn’t be necessary to own it: controlling the zoning/land-use process and assessing taxes on land as its more remunerative use rather than as vacant land, would get us most of the way there.
Housing First’s early goal was to create 2,500 new homes. It has created 3,500.
How many homes could have been built on the site of the old SPD headquarters, revitalizing that part of town? Since it’s demolition in the mid-oughts, it remains a hole in the ground across from city hall, paying the barest minimum of property tax assessed against a vacant parcel. Or the slowly evolving Northgate mall site, 55 acres that could have been a small town of its own, with access to the light rail network, the bus lines, and the freeway, if you ever needed anything you couldn’t get right there. But the idea of putting land — and housing — in the market, making an essential commodity like housing a speculative asset, means we can’t get there.
The biggest failure is a failure of imagination and we see it all the time.