Funding resilient and fragile social housing systems in Ireland and Denmark

This article explores the impact of social housing financing arrangements for the fragility and resilience of this tenure as evidenced by its propensity to shrink or expand over the long-run. To do so, it examines the cases of Ireland and Denmark and employs and develops the concept of ‘financial circuits’. This concept refers to dynamic flows of capital and revenue which move through the built environment in ways which are structured by the different funding streams which make them up, and by their interaction with the wider socio-economic context. The key insight offered here is that the cyclicality, permeability and breadth of financial circuits are key to understanding finance’s impact on the size and trajectory of the social housing tenure. The Danish social housing sector has doubled in size since the 1960s partially because it draws on broad financial circuits which consist of many different types of finance, including government, non-profit and financialised private sources. This insulates the sector from reductions in funding from any single source and avoids the boom/bust investment cycles common in Ireland where the sector relies almost entirely on government grants for funding.