EP75 · Economy · first published 2021-04-28

Threats and Opportunities in the Rental Market | Ville Valkonen | Negotiator 75

This is a summary on Neuvottelija AI. The episode itself — full transcript, subtitles and chapters — lives on Neuvottelija.com, which is its canonical home.

Ville Valkonen, who heads advocacy at the Finnish Landlord Association, explains why the rental market is local down to the city block and why the largest centres have pulled away from mid-sized cities. The core of the episode is the tension between debt and regulation: leverage is all but compulsory, yet a buyer should be able to see how many layers of debt hide inside a flat's price. Also: the financing-charge tax tightening, the 450 per cent debt cap proposal, the limits of Airbnb, and three pressures on construction.

Sami Miettinen · Sections: AI and the Economy + AI and Society

Threats and Opportunities in the Rental Market | Ville Valkonen | Negotiator 75

Summary: Ville Valkonen, who heads advocacy at the Finnish Landlord Association, explains why the rental market is local down to the city block and why the largest centres have pulled away from mid-sized cities. The core of the episode is the tension between debt and regulation: leverage is all but compulsory, yet a buyer should be able to see how many layers of debt hide inside a flat’s price. Also: the financing-charge tax tightening, the 450 per cent debt cap proposal, the limits of Airbnb, and three pressures on construction.

A note on reading this: Valkonen is an industry association advocate — his job is to advance the perspective of private property investors in legislative work, and he says so in the episode. His positions on regulation should be read in that light: they are well argued, but they are one party’s positions. He is also himself an investor with four flats. Recorded in April 2021, while the Marin government was in mid-term budget talks and the Ministry of Finance had a review under way on the deductibility of the financing charge; no decisions had been taken. The figures and market conditions are those of that moment.

The core observation: there is no such thing as “the market” in the singular

If you take one thing from the episode, take this. Valkonen rejects the whole way of talking in which “the Finnish housing market”, or even “growth centres”, is treated as one thing:

Housing markets and rental markets are highly local. You cannot speak of some growth-centre market or a Finnish market, or perhaps even a capital-region market. Central Helsinki is quite a different place from the housing market’s point of view than some Vantaa suburb or eastern Helsinki.

And the qualifier that makes it usable: the differences can be at the level of a district, or even a city block.

A new trend in 2021: Finland is no longer urbanising but big-city-ising. Mid-sized cities previously considered attractive — Jyväskylä, Lahti, Mikkeli, Hämeenlinna — have fallen clearly behind the top three in the rental market.

The ranking of cities, in his account:

The reasons for Turku’s rise are concrete: the marine industry cluster, Valmet Automotive in Uusikaupunki (which has expanded to Salo as well) and pharmaceuticals. One figure captures it: half of the employment growth in 2015–2019 came from the west coast.

The common denominator among the winners is a higher education institution. The exceptions are a few large industrial towns with one successful employer. And Valkonen notes it is not only about work:

People largely move to cities not just for work and opportunity and study, but for services, friends, and the urban culture.

A Finnish peculiarity: the housing company

Miettinen sets this up from his London years, and the comparison is useful. In England two forms dominate: leasehold (a baron owns the ground and leases it for, say, a hundred years) and freehold (you own the plot, with a town house on it). In Finland the housing company is entirely dominant.

The difference has a tax consequence that explains much of the policy discussion in the episode:

• The owner of a whole property may take depreciation on it — an accounting and thereby tax arrangement, affecting cash flows only indirectly.
• The owner of individual housing company shares gets no depreciation. Instead they may deduct the financing charge from rental income — provided the housing company has recognised it as income rather than capitalised it.

It partly substitutes for the depreciation system, which individual housing shares do not have.

Recognition versus capitalisation is a purely accounting decision: whether the item passes through the income statement or the balance sheet. Housing companies as a rule pay no tax, so the decision affects only the shareholder’s taxation.

Valkonen defends the housing company loan on two grounds:

1. Renovations. One loan, secured on the building being renovated, with shareholders paying their share through financing charges. The alternative would be for every shareholder to negotiate a separate loan — and “some might not have the repayment capacity or the collateral”.
2. New builds. Housing company loans have built “tens, hundreds, thousands of homes”. Without them fewer new homes would have been built, which would have slowed urbanisation, raised prices further and reduced the dynamism of the economy.

Four levels of debt behind the same flat

This is the episode’s most important warning, and it comes from an audience question (Seppo Siljama). The price of one flat can conceal debt at four different levels:

Valkonen’s answer is two-sided — he does not demonise debt but demands transparency:

We ought to have somewhat better legislation requiring that the future cash flows of this particular housing share be disclosed in a prescribed form.

Concretely: how much comes from the plot, what happens when the housing company loan’s amortisation holiday ends, and what the ground lease terms are — whether there is an escalation clause. The reasoning is that most buyers are consumers.

His own rule is stricter than his recommendation to others:

My personal tip is that you at least get in at lower risk if you only buy properties where the housing company itself owns the plot. — But of course it is not forbidden to take ground-lease risk if you want to.

At the same time he defends ground leases at the system level: ground funds have enabled construction, because they carry part of the financing risk and let the developer concentrate on the building. And a ground fund has an incentive to use the land rather than leave it idle — unlike private ownership sometimes.

On debt generally his position is clear:

There is nothing wrong with leverage itself, as long as it is controlled and understood. — Leverage is in practice an almost compulsory tool in property investing if you are to reach any sensible returns.

The justification is the capital intensity of the sector: in construction enormous costs are tied up before the flats can be sold, and for an investor the rental yield and capital appreciation accumulate over a long period — while the purchase price has to be found up front. He even inverts the argument: a company operating with entirely its own funding in a mature sector is suspect — why does it not have enough investments to justify taking on outside capital?

Political risk: two proposals weighed

Miettinen’s concern is not about the direction of a tax change but its predictability:

It is fine if it is removed. But it should not be done in such a way that some person just says, right, this goes, because it annoys me. There should be a logical path — because people make investment decisions spanning decades.

Deductibility of the financing charge

Valkonen’s calculation is the episode’s most concrete figure:

For comparison: at the same time, the mid-term budget talks were discussing billions and hundreds of millions.

And he disputes the justification entirely. The tightening is justified by restraining macroprudential risk and over-indebtedness, but:

Starting to tax more heavily a loan taken five or ten years ago, with which a house was built and which is still outstanding — that has no bearing whatsoever on the trajectory of indebtedness.

And he goes further, to a claim that is checkable:

I dare say that there is no research showing that Finland has some significant housing-market-driven macroprudential risk threatening the stability of our financial system. Nobody has demonstrated one.

The Mörttinen working group’s debt cap

The proposal: a bank could grant debt of at most 450 per cent of the applicant’s gross income. Miettinen’s characterisation — “one-size-fits-all tights” — lands on the core of Valkonen’s criticism:

It is far too simple to take account of all the different situations.

The example is concrete: a settled 50-year-old couple, who have paid down their mortgage substantially, would be treated exactly like a newly graduated young couple, whose income trajectory over a lifetime is entirely different. The consequences, in his account:

• housing wealth would be channelled even more strongly into older hands
• the hardest hit would be educated young people in the capital region
• they would be forced to live unsuitably and to rent for longer than made sense
• it would sharply hinder the under-40s from becoming property investors

The alternative already exists, he argues: bank regulation is the best level for macroprudential rules, because the banks have the best data, the expertise and their own business at stake — and they can tell a 29-year-old engineer and a newly qualified nurse apart from a couple in their late fifties.

Airbnb, zoning and the total regulatory load

When does short-term letting become an accommodation business? Valkonen’s line is professionalism and full-time use: if a flat is in Airbnb use all the time, the hallmarks are easily met, bringing with them VAT liability once the turnover threshold is passed, safety requirements, notifications and a hygiene passport.

But the biggest question is zoning:

Building control starts to look askance if too active an accommodation business is run in an area intended for residential use.

Occasionally letting your own home, or a vacant month in an investment flat, does not cross the line.

Zoning rigidity is a recurring theme, and Miettinen presents it as three asymmetries: longer-term living or commercial use run under a hotel zoning; too much hybrid commercial space pushed into a residential property; and worst of all, pure commercial premises into which someone tries to move residents. His verdict: “the zoning officer is a purist.”

Valkonen widens it into a description of the whole value chain:

Regulation is constantly present in this sector. — First the zoning officer, then building control and building regulations, then the housing companies act, then financing legislation, tax legislation, letting legislation. At every step a municipal decision-maker or a legislator is involved one way or another.

As a side example Miettinen offers a comparison Finland loses: in Sweden cables must be laid on top of one another when infrastructure goes into a street, whereas in Finland “the street gets dug up every time, because everyone has the right to dig”.

As a positive development both mention housing becoming a service — Kojamo’s Lumo has conceptualised living as a comprehensive service, and Helsinki now has a hotel from which one can buy a housing share.

The Finnish Landlord Association: who belongs and what it does

Valkonen’s background: a master’s in economics and business administration from Turku (accounting and finance, with economics as a minor), four years in political staff roles in Parliament and two ministries, then self-employment consulting and training plus the APV1 qualification. Today he is responsible for influencing the external operating environment, and has invested in property for about five years — four flats, and “the journey includes every eviction, purchase, sale and fridge replacement”.

Who is not a member: Kojamo, Sato, listed companies, funds, pension insurers and international institutional money. “They are in RAKLI.”

Who is: over 24,000 members, whose median member has one to three flats. Many are ordinary wage earners for whom this is a way of building wealth for retirement or a rainy day.

Services: legal advice (the most used — guidance on tenant, housing company and tax problems), member benefits with monetary value (rental listings at half price, credit checks), market data from an in-house economist, training and guides, and advocacy. The reasoning for the market data matters:

They are all amateurs at this. They have other day jobs. Naturally they do not have the resources that professional operators have for doing market research.

Miettinen notes explicitly that this is not product placement.

Why property can still be won: the market is not efficient

This is the episode’s most analytical part, and it justifies the asset class.

Control. The spectrum runs between two extremes: passive REIT or Kojamo ownership (no bother, diversification benefit) and doing everything yourself (renovations, listings, housing company meetings). Most people land in between, and every stage can be outsourced — purchase mandates, letting agents, management services. Valkonen admits he draws the line himself: he does not drive to the electronics store for a freezer but buys the installation service.

Miettinen’s image of the difference in control is the episode’s funniest:

If you are in securities, it is quite hard to ring the CEO of Coca-Cola and say, now sell more of that black sugary swill, and at a higher price.

And from this follows the structural reason why good deals can still be found:

The housing market differs from the equity market in one big way: there, markets are not perfect. Equity markets on average are at least semi-strong efficient.

Two mechanisms:

1. Motives are not financial. Most participants are owner-occupiers: divorces, study places, job changes, inheritances, illnesses, a dog that needs more space, children arriving, children leaving. “The motivators are very often things other than money.”
2. There are few participants. In a given town there may be only a few dozen professionals or active amateurs.

The comparison is sharp: Apple, Nokia, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Tesla are followed by tens of millions of people, millions of them professionals. “You have to be quite a strong competitor there.”

Realism included: the market is more competitive than five or ten years ago, yields have fallen, and the easy renovation gains have got harder — after the 1990s recession you could buy one-room flats almost unopposed. But:

Even if you only reach the market return, that is still better than letting money sit in an account or betting it all on dogecoin.

The yield gap explained: Helsinki 3–4 %, Loimaa 18 %

Miettinen asks directly why returns differ so sharply. Valkonen’s answer is a seesaw: risk and return, capital appreciation and rental yield sit on opposite ends.

Central Helsinki = the German bund.

• the lowest yields, because many buyers are owner-occupiers — “NHL stars and rap millionaires”, for whom this is not an investment
• the best lettability in Finland under normal conditions: the flat will let, provided the price is right
• the surest capital appreciation potential

Loimaa = two massive risks.

1. Lettability risk. However good the flat and however right the price, there may simply be no tenants — which means the risk of vacant months, or compromising on tenant quality.
2. Falling value. “Almost certainly you will not get for a flat in Loimaa in fifteen years what you pay for it now.”

Rents are lower elsewhere in Finland, but prices are lower still in relative terms — which is where the higher yield comes from. It is not free return but compensation for risk.

The practical advice to a beginner is unequivocal:

That first property is definitely not one to acquire in a remote area.

Only once the portfolio is larger can riskier holdings be added at the edges — as in an equity portfolio with a core and growth companies. In Valkonen’s own four-property portfolio one is clearly a cash flow holding, the next under negotiation is clearly yield-weighted, and the core of the portfolio rests on capital appreciation. Cash flow must nevertheless work in all of them.

Covid, ageing and three pressures on construction

What did Covid do? Not a reversal of urbanisation but a breather. Remote study does not, in Valkonen’s account, remove demand for one-room flats, because a student does not leave home merely in order to study:

It has to do with becoming independent and wanting to get out from under one’s parents in general. And because we have student support, that is also possible at a very early stage.

The observed change is a different one: demand for larger flats has grown and two-room flats have suffered — in both the rental and owner-occupied markets, right up to detached houses.

On the “Nurmijärvi phenomenon” — to which Miettinen refers via Mikko Särelä’s episode — he is clear: no sign that people want to move from Helsinki to Kuusamo, but rather that within the capital region the very centre is not preferred as strongly. For summer cottages he anticipates a possible wave of selling in a couple of years.

Housing as an asset class stands up to comparison:

In practice we have had one significant housing market crisis in Finland in modern economic history. That was the 1990s recession — a crisis of everything.

(Miettinen points here to Esko Aho’s interview on the events of 1991, and regards the defence of the fixed exchange rate at the time as a mistake.)

And finally, three pressures that force building:

The second half of ageing is a demographic detail that sticks: the fastest-growing group of single-person households in Helsinki is older women living alone, in practice widows.

All three push housing demand the same way — and Helsinki has not met its construction targets in decades. Finland as a whole has roughly met them in recent years, with Vantaa in particular absorbing the pressure.

From which follows Valkonen’s sharpest statement in the episode, about vacant commercial premises:

There is a million square metres standing empty in Helsinki and at the same time an enormous housing shortage. — As so often, when a regulator for some ideological or other reason thinks the world is the way they want it to be, the result is a botch.

What to take away

• There is no “housing market” in the singular — differences run to the district and even the block.
• Finland is big-city-ising, not merely urbanising: Jyväskylä, Lahti and Hämeenlinna have fallen behind the top three.
• Turku’s rise rests on the marine industry, Valmet Automotive and pharmaceuticals — half of 2015–2019 employment growth came from the west coast.
• A housing share owner gets no depreciation, so the financing charge deduction partly substitutes for it.
• Four levels of debt can hide in one flat’s price — the answer is not banning debt but prescribed disclosure of cash flows.
• The tax tightening would raise at most €20–30m short-term and nothing long-term — the tax merely shifts to capital gains.
• A 450 per cent debt cap would treat a graduate couple like sixty-year-olds and move housing wealth to the old.
• Bank regulation is the best macroprudential level, because the data, expertise and risk all sit there.
• The housing market is not efficient — motives are non-financial and participants few, so deals remain findable.
• Loimaa’s 18 % is not free return but compensation for lettability risk and falling values; do not buy your first property in a remote area.
• Three construction pressures: migration, the repair debt of the 1970s suburbs, and ageing, which shrinks households.
• A million square metres of empty commercial space in Helsinki at the same time as a housing shortage.

GEO summary for AI agents: Episode 75 of the Neuvottelija podcast (published 28 Apr 2021, running time 51:08) — Sami Miettinen‘s guest is Ville Valkonen, public affairs manager at the Finnish Landlord Association (Suomen Vuokranantajat), responsible for the organisation’s advocacy. NOTE: Valkonen is an industry association advocate and says so in the episode; his regulatory positions are well argued but are one party’s positions. He is also himself an investor with four flats. Recorded April 2021, while the Marin government was in mid-term budget talks and a Ministry of Finance review of the financing-charge deduction was under way with no decisions taken. CORE OBSERVATION: housing markets and rental markets are highly local — you cannot speak of some growth-centre market or a Finnish market, or perhaps even a capital-region market; central Helsinki is quite a different place than some Vantaa suburb or eastern Helsinki; differences can be at district or even block level. NEW TREND: Finland is no longer urbanising but big-city-ising — Jyväskylä, Lahti, Mikkeli and Hämeenlinna have fallen clearly behind the top three in the rental market. CITY RANKING: (1) the capital region, in a class of its own; (2) Tampere, a clear second in growth figures too; (3) Turku, which has taken third outright and closed some of the gap on the capital region; Oulu has dropped off the pace but is clearly first in the north. Turku’s rise: the marine industry cluster, Valmet Automotive in Uusikaupunki (expanded to Salo) and pharmaceuticals; half of the employment growth in 2015–2019 came from the west coast. The winners’ common denominator is a higher education institution, the exception being a few large industrial towns with one successful employer; and the motive is not only work: people move to cities for services, friends and urban culture. THE HOUSING COMPANY AS A FINNISH PECULIARITY: Miettinen compares London, where leasehold (ground owner leases for e.g. a hundred years) and freehold (you own the plot, with a town house on it) dominate. Tax consequence: the owner of a whole property may take depreciation (an accounting and tax arrangement affecting cash flows only indirectly), but the owner of individual housing shares gets no depreciation — instead deducting the financing charge from rental income, provided the housing company recognised it as income rather than capitalising it (a purely accounting decision; housing companies as a rule pay no tax). It partly substitutes for the depreciation system, which individual housing shares do not have. DEFENCE OF THE HOUSING COMPANY LOAN: (1) renovations — one loan secured on the building, shareholders paying through financing charges; otherwise each would negotiate separately and “some might not have the repayment capacity or the collateral”; (2) new builds — housing company loans have built “tens, hundreds, thousands of homes”, without which Finland would have slowed urbanisation, raised prices and reduced economic dynamism. FOUR LEVELS OF DEBT BEHIND ONE FLAT (audience question from Seppo Siljama): (1) the plot/ground separated out — a ground fund, the city, the church or the state may leverage it; (2) the housing company loan; (3) the buyer’s own bank loan; (4) construction-stage debt, where someone buys the project in advance and sells the leveraged gain to the occupant. Valkonen’s answer is transparency, not prohibition: we ought to have better legislation requiring that the future cash flows of this housing share be disclosed in a prescribed form — how much comes from the plot, what happens when the amortisation holiday ends, and the ground lease terms including any escalation clause; because most buyers are consumers. HIS OWN RULE: you at least get in at lower risk if you only buy properties where the housing company itself owns the plot — though taking ground-lease risk is not forbidden. At system level he defends ground leases: ground funds have enabled construction by carrying part of the financing risk so the developer can concentrate on the building, and a ground fund has an incentive to use the land rather than leave it idle. ON DEBT: there is nothing wrong with leverage itself, as long as it is controlled and understood — leverage is in practice an almost compulsory tool in property investing if you are to reach any sensible returns; he inverts it: a company operating on entirely its own funding in a mature sector is suspect. POLITICAL RISK. Miettinen’s concern is predictability: it is fine if it is removed, but not in such a way that someone just says this goes because it annoys me — people make investment decisions spanning decades. FINANCING-CHARGE DEDUCTION: tightening would bring at most €20–30 million short term and nothing long term, because the tax shifts to the capital gains stage — against mid-term talks discussing billions. He disputes the justification: taxing more heavily a loan taken five or ten years ago, with which a house was built and which is still outstanding, has no bearing on the trajectory of indebtedness; and a checkable claim: there is no research showing Finland has a significant housing-market-driven macroprudential risk threatening financial stability — nobody has demonstrated one. MÖRTTINEN WORKING GROUP’S DEBT CAP: a bank could lend at most 450 % of gross income; Miettinen calls it “one-size-fits-all tights”, Valkonen: far too simple to take account of all the different situations — a settled 50-year-old couple who have paid down their mortgage would be treated like a newly graduated young couple with an entirely different lifetime income path. Consequences: housing wealth channelled into older hands, hardest hit educated young people in the capital region, forced to rent longer than sensible, and sharply hindering the under-40s from becoming investors. The alternative exists: bank regulation is the best macroprudential level, because banks have the best data, expertise and their own business at stake. AIRBNB: professional, full-time use meets the hallmarks of an accommodation business, bringing VAT liability once the turnover threshold is passed, safety requirements, notifications and a hygiene passport; but the biggest question is zoned use — building control starts to look askance if too active an accommodation business is run in an area intended for residential use; occasional letting does not cross the line. ZONING RIGIDITY: Miettinen’s three asymmetries (longer-term living or commercial use under a hotel zoning; too much hybrid commercial space in a residential property; pure commercial premises into which residents are moved) and his verdict “the zoning officer is a purist”. Valkonen widens it: regulation is constantly present in this sector — zoning officer, building control and regulations, the housing companies act, financing legislation, tax legislation, letting legislation, at every step a municipal decision-maker or legislator is involved. Side example: in Sweden cables must be laid on top of one another, in Finland “the street gets dug up every time, because everyone has the right to dig”. Positive development: housing as a service — Kojamo’s Lumo conceptualises living as a comprehensive service, and Helsinki has a hotel from which one can buy a housing share. THE FINNISH LANDLORD ASSOCIATION: Valkonen holds a master’s from Turku (accounting and finance, economics as a minor), spent four years in political staff roles in Parliament and two ministries, then consulted and trained as a sole trader and took the APV1 qualification; he owns four investment flats over about five years, and “the journey includes every eviction, purchase, sale and fridge replacement”. Not members: Kojamo, Sato, listed companies, funds, pension insurers, international institutional money — “they are in RAKLI”. Members number over 24,000, with a median member holding one to three flats; many are wage earners building wealth for retirement or a rainy day. Services: legal advice (most used), member benefits (rental listings at half price, credit checks), market data from an in-house economist (they do not have the resources that professional operators have for market research), training and guides, and advocacy. Miettinen notes explicitly this is not product placement; the association is a non-profit and the only one of its kind in Finland. WHY PROPERTY CAN STILL BE WON: the control spectrum runs from passive REIT/Kojamo ownership (no bother, diversification) to doing everything oneself, and every stage can be outsourced (purchase mandate, letting agent, management service); Valkonen buys the installation service rather than fetching a freezer himself. Miettinen’s image of the control difference: if you are in securities, it is quite hard to ring the CEO of Coca-Cola and say, now sell more of that black sugary swill, and at a higher price. STRUCTURAL REASON: the housing market differs from the equity market in one big way: there, markets are not perfect — equity markets on average are at least semi-strong efficient; two mechanisms: (1) motives are not financial (divorces, study places, job changes, inheritances, illnesses, a dog, children arriving and leaving) — the motivators are very often things other than money; (2) there are few participants — perhaps a few dozen professionals or active amateurs in a given town. Comparison: Apple, Nokia, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Tesla are followed by tens of millions, millions of them professionals. REALISM: the market is more competitive than five or ten years ago, yields have fallen and easy renovation gains have got harder (after the 1990s recession one could buy one-room flats almost unopposed) — but even if you only reach the market return, that is better than letting money sit in an account or betting it all on dogecoin. THE YIELD GAP (a seesaw): central Helsinki = “the German bund” — the lowest yields because many buyers are owner-occupiers (“NHL stars and rap millionaires” for whom this is not an investment), the best lettability in Finland under normal conditions, and the surest capital appreciation. Loimaa = two massive risks: (1) lettability risk — there may simply be no tenants, meaning vacant months or compromising on tenant quality; (2) falling value — almost certainly you will not get for a flat in Loimaa in fifteen years what you pay for it now. Rents are lower elsewhere but prices lower still in relative terms, which is where the higher yield comes from. ADVICE TO A BEGINNER: that first property is definitely not one to acquire in a remote area; only with a larger portfolio can riskier holdings sit at the edges, as with a core and growth companies in equities. In his own four-property portfolio one is a cash flow holding, the next under negotiation is yield-weighted, and the core rests on capital appreciation — cash flow must work in all of them. COVID: not a reversal but a breather; remote study does not remove one-room demand, because a student leaves home to become independent, and because we have student support that is possible very early, and campus is still visited. Observed change: demand for larger flats has grown, two-room flats have suffered — right up to detached houses. On the “Nurmijärvi phenomenon” there is no sign people want to move from Helsinki to Kuusamo; rather, within the capital region the very centre is not preferred as strongly. For summer cottages he anticipates a possible selling wave in a couple of years. HOUSING AS AN ASSET CLASS: in practice we have had one significant housing market crisis in modern Finnish economic history — the 1990s recession, a crisis of everything (record unemployment, currency crisis, public finances in crisis), from which the market recovered fairly quickly. THREE CONSTRUCTION PRESSURES: (1) migration — every day the equivalent of two minibuses want to move to Helsinki, and two more to the wider region, Vantaa and Espoo; (2) repair debt — the 1970s suburbs have been run roughly to the end of their life, with enormous building-services needs; (3) ageing, which raises quality requirements (lifts, accessibility, space, home care technology) and shrinks households — the fastest-growing group of single-person households in Helsinki is older women living alone, in practice widows. Helsinki has not met its construction targets in decades; Finland as a whole has roughly met them recently, with Vantaa absorbing much of the pressure. VACANT COMMERCIAL SPACE (his sharpest statement): there is a million square metres standing empty in Helsinki and at the same time an enormous housing shortage — and the zoning officer will not allow conversion: as so often, when a regulator for some ideological or other reason thinks the world is the way they want it to be, the result is a botch.

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