What if the housing shortage is not a number but a choice?

In Pims Digital Maze Pim van Meer starts a new series today: a series of columns about solving the housing shortage. The emphasis is on how digitization can help to not only invent those solutions, but also implement them. But first we need to know what we're talking about!

In this first installment of this series on solving housing shortage, I don't want to solve or build anything, industrialize anything, designate any acres. We are only going to spotlight the one word that comes up in the news almost every day: there is a "housing shortage." And then it quickly becomes apparent that the problem is more vicious - and, frankly, more abstract - than the headlines suggest.

Because before we fly to concrete solutions, we need to do something we are bad at in the industry: first get the problem fileably sharp. For years, we have been running with conviction toward everything called solution, without defining exactly what we actually want to solve. It feels decisive, it produces nice press moments, but it is often mostly fussing around a vague issue.

There is a housing shortage of 353,000 homes. It sounds tough, such a hard figure. Nice and clear. But the housing shortage is not a natural phenomenon like wind force 8. It's a model. A set of assumptions in a spreadsheet that we are rarely honest about. And when you change those assumptions, the shortage changes - without adding a single brick. I welcome the sense of urgency, because then we can act better. But the question remains, how do we measure?

Take three people who, on paper, are perfectly well housed. The twenty-something in the attic with his parents: not by choice, but because he's been missing out on everything for three years - and as long as he doesn't count as an independent household, he sometimes exists in the statistics; the couple with baby in fifty square meters: officially fine housed, but with a stroller against the dining table and a playpen in front of the balcony door, it's just called in the numbers mismatch; the divorced woman in a friend's spare room: there's a bed but no file, until it folds after a few months and only then does she come into the picture as an emergency seeker.

Depending on how many of these people you dare to count, the housing shortage shifts by hundreds of thousands of homes. Not by building, but by definitions. That's the first turn in the digital maze: we pretend the shortage is about bricks, when it's just as much about friction in lives.

What do we actually think is normal? Waiting five years for social rent? 45 square meters for 2 starters? Spending forty percent of your income on housing? Twenty-somethings who don't have their own doorbell until they're 30? Housing associations losing money on new construction?

As long as we don't speak that standard out loud, the shortage will remain a kind of magic number that no one really cares about. Then we steer toward one hundred thousand homes per year instead of a maximum three-year waiting period or a maximum thirty percent housing shortage. And so then we are solution-oriented on a problem definition that was never explicitly chosen.

You can see the consequence everywhere: we run harder in the same circle. More locations, more tenders, more artist impressions. Sometimes even more rules, because somewhere we feel it's not right, but don't dare cut the original assumptions.

I sometimes fantasize about a different dashboard. Not one big counter with so many housing shortages, but a housing radar with a some real relevant and merciless metrics: Average waiting time per target group. Percentage of income that first-time buyers spend on housing. Area per capita. Number of hidden households in attics, banks and campgrounds. How many moves one new construction project releases.

That is also housing shortage. Only not packaged as one dramatic number for the news, but as a set of tensions in time, money and opportunities. I want to focus on those opportunities!

And then it gets interesting. Because who gets to decide which dashboard we use?

Is it the state, which is running a national model? The region, shouting that with them it is mainly the middle segment that is pinching? Or the municipality, which defends its own Excel because otherwise it will not achieve the housing agreement? The developer who needs a return on investment to buy his next project?

We are now pretending to be neutral. As if science has calculated the housing shortage and politics merely responds obediently. In reality it is the other way around: first we choose what we find acceptable, then we build a model around it.

So in my digital maze, the first step is not: build harder.
The first step is: putting the model on the table, what are we going to measure? What are we going to focus on?
What people are hiding behind neat tables? What tensions have we tacitly normalized because they didn't fit into one number?

Only when we do can you honestly say what you choose. Maybe then we will decide that the real shortage is not 390,000 housing units, but: too many years, too many percent income, too many lives on hold.

Filing moment

Before we start sprinkling industrialization, chain direction, flex housing and welfare 2.0 in future installments, we should dare to draw one uncomfortable conclusion: if you don't sharply define the problem, sooner or later every solution itself becomes a new problem.

And somewhere, when the graphs fade out and the news bulletins go back to being about something else, one question remains: are we solving the housing shortage, or are we mostly feeding a number that was never really our own?

About Pim's digital maze

In this column, Pim takes you into the sometimes wonderful, tangled but rapidly changing world of digitization. He draws on his experiences as director of digitalization at VORM. Pim is outspoken, critical, but above all wants to help you. Are you stuck in the digital maze? Pim helps you find the way out.... Do you have a question for Pim or are you looking to get in touch with him? Follow Pim on LinkedIN.