3 november 2026

The Creeping Transformation? – Housing system change and affordability in Finland

Elina Sutela, University Teacher (PhD) in Social Policy, University of Turku

Sammanfattning
The Finnish housing system has gained a positive international reputation, particularly for its success in reducing homelessness. It has also performed well in meeting housing needs. For instance, Finland has had one of the lowest housing cost overburden rates in the EU. However, things are changing. Most importantly, the current government, which took office in 2023, has made a range of changes to the Finnish welfare and housing system, including cuts to social security benefits, particularly housing allowances, as well as retrenchments in and increased targeting of public housing provision. The aftermath of these changes is becoming increasingly tangible. Homelessness has risen for two consecutive years, and evictions have increased by 80% in large cities over the past decade, and particularly after 2022. Despite the magnitude of these policy changes and their consequences, the housing question has received only limited public attention. Moreover, the consequences have not been adequately assessed, as they fall under the mandates of several different ministries.

In this presentation, I will discuss these ongoing changes in the Finnish housing system, and consider their potential consequences. I base the presentation on my recently published PhD thesis on urban housing affordability in Finland and on a manuscript that my colleague, Dr. Mika Hyötyläinen, and I are currently preparing. I call this shift in the housing system “a creeping transformation”, as the current changes are significant, yet their effects remain largely unnoticed and are only beginning to emerge. I argue that, taken together, these developments are gradually steering the Finnish housing system towards a more marketised and financialised model of housing provision. Drawing on the international literature and comparative examples, there is reason to expect that this transformation will increase housing inequality and precarity, especially among low-income and otherwise vulnerable groups.

From Shared Values to Shareholder Value: The assetisation of a union-built social housing cooperative

Daisy Charlesworth, doktorand vid Institutionen för kulturgeografi och ekonomisk geografi, Lunds universitet

Sammanfattning
Under rentier capitalism, class struggle extends beyond production, encompassing the entire process of value appropriation, circulation and distribution. Housing is a stark example. In post-war Nordic welfare states, organised labour played key roles in endorsing wide provision of affordable social housing. Today, workers are not only dominated as wage-labourers but also as tenants and debtors, struggling against rising rents and precarious mortgages. How are labour organisations adjusting their role in this complex struggle? Illustrating the omnipresence of rentiership, we explore the case of an unexpected rentier: the trade union. In 1969, Finnish trade unions established a social housing cooperative, VVO, to provide affordable housing for their members. Over the following decades, VVO became one of the largest social rental housing providers in Finland. Since the 1990s, it has privatised or sold off most of its social housing stock. Known today as Kojamo, it is Finland’s largest private real estate investment company. Finnish trade unions remain among Kojamo’s biggest shareholders. This paper explores how and why unions decided to assetise their affordable housing. Through a qualitative document study supplemented with expert interviews, we find the answer in a residualising state housing policy and the retrenching role and realignment of unions’ purposes.