The Housing Situation of Under-30s
- Fragments towards an understanding of young people’s options in the housing market and what difficulties they encounter

by Henrik Christoffersen, January 2008

• Report only available in Danish

Summary

On forming an overview of under-30s’ options in the housing market 

The way in which the housing market functions and the related thinking as to what challenges are or should be the concerns of housing policy, change over time. For a very long time, the main problem has been housing shortage, and that fact has influenced thinking in this area so that it has been considered the highest task of Danish housing policy to counter the shortage by encouraging new building. The future need for new building was still central in the most recent major official publication on the housing situation, namely the Danish Ministry of Social Affairs 2006 report on the future of the social housing sector.

The question of housing need has also been the focus of those studies and reports that have looked especially at the housing situation of young people in Denmark. However, there are now strong indications that the question ought to be understood in a more nuanced way. For example, in recent years difficulties have been experienced in letting some of the reserved housing dedicated for young people’s use. In some places, the extent of non-take-up has been such that dedicated housing has been withdrawn or converted for other use. In the major university towns there still tend to be shortages of housing for young people just at the beginning of the academic year after the summer vacations, but this phenomenon also now has a changed character in that the peak pressure on housing quickly subsides and does not reappear until the beginning of the next academic year.

Denmark has been implementing a policy of continuous construction of housing reserved for under 30s, and there are now more than 50,000 units of such housing in various forms. Nevertheless, it is only one in ten households of people in the 18-29 age group that live in such dwellings. The overwhelming majority of young people are thus finding accommodation in the general housing stock, in competition with the rest of the population. Moreover, the ways in which they are doing so are such that the previous practice of taking a room as a lodger in a private home has almost passed out of use.

In view of this development, where it is now usual that young people themselves find their housing solution in the form of an actual housing unit, and when not all the dedicated under-30s housing is necessarily attractive enough to be in demand, the obvious question that arises is, ‘What is the form of the challenge to be addressed in future by a housing policy for young people?’ As a basis for such reflections it will be relevant to form an understanding of what options young home-seekers actually have in the housing market and the difficulties they encounter when looking for a housing solution that meets their desires. Whereas the themes of housing policy have been to a large extent defined by the various forms of housing and the need for new building of these forms of housing, it now appears that there are reasons to turn the focus towards young home-seekers and the way in which they experience housing options.

This report draws a picture of the complicated reality that young home-seekers must experience when they survey the Danish housing stock and ask themselves how best to arrange housing for themselves.

The complexity of the reality they face is directly related to the existence of a number of different forms of property ownership, each with its own set of rules. However, the fundamental explanation of this complexity as experienced by them is that the forms of ownership existing in the housing stock, if the dedicated housing is disregarded, can be described as in varying degrees youth-hostile. The largest part of the housing stock consists of privately owned dwellings, but this market makes demands as to income and capital that it can be difficult for young people to satisfy. The second-largest part of the housing stock by ownership type consists of social housing. Allocation of this type of housing is by waiting-list, and this is also not a mechanism that favours the young. And if the young home-seeker is hoping for private rented accommodation or a reasonably inexpensive cooperative housing society dwelling, it is best to have personal contacts to provide an introduction, – something that not all young people have.

In this situation, many young people find housing solutions that are unorthodox, at least in relation to the design of housing statistics and the concepts that prevail in the discussion of housing policy. Many young people are not owner-occupiers, cooperative housing society members or tenants of private rented accommodation. Instead, they are subtenants, tenants on short-term lets, tenants in properties bought by their parents, participants in groups of young people taking joint tenancies on apartments, members of communes, etc. We have very little specific knowledge about how common housing solutions of this type actually are among young people only that such types of solution are quite widespread. We also know that they play a particularly important part in the major city centres, where many young people wish to live, and where an insecure and unorthodox housing solution is preferred by many of them to life in regular dedicated accommodation in a suburban residential area.

The extent to which young people can mobilise the resources to enable them to find housing solutions that satisfy them is variable. Doubtless, for some it will be difficult to meet this challenge. Local authorities have special responsibilities with respect to young people with special needs, and they are free to involve themselves in the question of how the housing supply is functioning in their area. The trends identified above offer an obvious reason to give special attention to how local authorities approach the issue of housing for young people.

This report has been produced in the context of ongoing work on a research project on the housing situation of under-30s that was set in motion by the Danish Ministry of Social Affairs in 2006. The report consists of four parts:

First, a picture is drawn of the social trends that may justify moving the focus of the housing policy discussion away from the question of housing shortage in order to concentrate more on how the housing stock is used, and, in that context, particularly on how the housing stock is used by young people. Reference is also made here to the studies regarding the issue of dedicated under-30s’ housing that have been conducted over the last two decades, and it is shown how existing studies have been to a large extent designed as aids to consideration of housing need.

A brief description is then given of how the housing market as an institution must appear when faced by young people.

In the next part, the results are presented of a series of studies that are in progress as part of the research project. The fact that our knowledge of how young people actually arrange housing solutions for themselves is heavily deficient, because many of them find ways that are not directly cover­ed by the descriptive housing statistics, means that there is a great need for knowledge going beyond what the statistics are already able to tell us.

Finally, on the basis of a questionnaire sent to all local authorities, an account is given of the Danish local authorities’ approach to the housing situation of young people, immediately following the creation of the new local government structure.

The report thus looks at selected different features that as yet hardly form a unified picture. Work is continuing in the research project with the aim of adding further fragments, to bring us nearer to being able to produce such an overall picture.

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