Housing demand and spatial demand for housing until 2020

These scenarios have been developed as part of CPB's recent long-term study for the Dutch economy. The main objective of this paper is to detect trends and bottlenecks on the market for housing and spatial demand for housing, taking into account existing housing and spatial planning policies.

The paper starts out be discussing the driving forces behind housing demand, which are demographic developments, economic variables, socio-cultural trends and government policy. Subsequently, three scenarios for the Dutch economy until 2020 are discussed. Divided Europe (DE) features low economic and population growth while European Coordination (EC) and Global Competition (GC) show a rapid economic and higher population growth.

These scenarios form the basis for calculating housing demand. Housing demand increases in all scenarios although economic growth is less than in the past 25 years. The largest increase occurs in GC, the smallest in DE. The market shares of owner-occupied housing and single-family dwellings rise, especially in GC.

The level and composition of housing production, together with estimates for spatial demand by type of dwelling, determine unrestricted spatial demands for housing in the scenarios. A confrontation with spatial supply according to present policy shows that in the high growth scenarios bottlenecks exist in 2010 for all regions except the region Northeast. Until 2020 considerable amounts of land should become available on top of current land supply to meet spatial demand for housing. Finally some policy options are analyzed in terms of their ability to alleviate the bottlenecks.