Taking the social out of social housing? Recent developments, current tendencies and future challenges to the Danish social housing model

ABSTRACT The Danish social housing sector is not actually a social housing sector in the sense that it supplies housing only to the socially deprived. Rather, the sector is open to everyone who puts their name on a waiting list. Applicants are not means-tested and the sector makes up 20% of housing in Denmark, thus providing housing for a substantial share of the Danish population. The sector has, however, increasingly come to be seen as solely for those who cannot afford other tenures and in some social housing areas, the majority of residents are indeed deprived. Regulation has been introduced in the last two decades to tackle this through a range of measures aimed at steering the resident composition of deprived social housing areas towards a broader social mix. However, these measures present a challenge to the principle of equal access to social housing, side-tracking the objective waiting list system, making it less transparent and more inequitable. There has been much debate about housing affordability for the lower middle classes in the major cities, although with limited focus on affordability for deprived citizens. Overall, those who lose out are those who already had the least choice in the housing market. This paper presents the development of the Danish social housing sector in the past two decades, discusses current tendencies in national and local planning regarding social housing, and points to future challenges for the sector. It is safe to say that the wobbliness of the pillar (Torgersen, 1987) is increasing and that an essential part of the welfare state is at risk of serving the wrong resident groups.