Abstract
The struggle of cities to achieve quantitative housing objectives can partly be explained by the struggle to cope with increasing value conflicts with other (qualitative) policy objectives, including the realization of affordable housing, climate adaptive areas, inclusive neighborhoods, and high-quality public spaces. In public debate in the Netherlands, too high ambitions and a ‘piling-up’ of policy objectives are often mentioned as causes of non-conformance of quantitative housing objectives. However, despite such non-conformance, a plan or policy may still function well by informing the decision-making process and invoking scrutiny of conflicting objectives. This paper aims to understand how municipalities cope with the implementation of housing developments with pluralistic policy objectives. Therefore, the performance of the policy objective to accelerate the production of housing is studied by exploring how value conflicts between this quantitative and qualitative objectives are addressed. A survey among Dutch municipalities and two additional in-depth case studies reveal that the non-conformance of the acceleration of the housing production not only results from exogenous processes, but is also a result of accumulating policy decisions favouring qualitative ambitions. The case studies reveal that municipalities especially struggle with trade-offs between qualitative and quantitative objectives. This result shows the relevance of additional research that focus on value conflicts in public policy implementation processes.
Highlights
The Netherlands face an urgent housing shortage
The struggle of cities to achieve quantitative housing objectives can partly be explained by the struggle to cope with increasing value conflicts with other policy objectives, including the realization of affordable housing, climate adaptive areas, inclusive neighborhoods, and high-quality public spaces
In public debate in the Netherlands, too high ambitions and a ‘piling-up’ of policy objectives are often mentioned as causes of nonconformance of quantitative housing objectives
Summary
The Netherlands face an urgent housing shortage. The need for additional housing in the Netherlands has been projected to be 1 million by the year 2035 (ABF Research, 2019). The other 750,000 dwellings are needed to make up for the current housing shortage of more than 300, 000 and to absorb expected growth in population and number of households (ABF Research, 2019). For years housing pro duction has been insufficient to catch up on increasing demand, and production is expected to remain insufficient in the few years (Economisch Instituut voor de Bouw, 2020). While in 1972 no less than 157,000 housing units were added to the Dutch housing stock, pro duction for years has not surpassed 75,000 units (CBS Statistics Netherlands, 2021)
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