Land for housing: Quantitative targets and qualitative ambitions in Dutch housing development

Arend Jonkman, Rick Meijer and Thomas Hartmann

Land Use Policy, 2022, vol. 114, issue C

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.

Keywords: Housing development; Land policy; Value conflicts; Policy analysis; Policy performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837721006803
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:lauspo:v:114:y:2022:i:c:s0264837721006803

DOI: 10.1016/j.landusepol.2021.105957

Access Statistics for this article

Land Use Policy is currently edited by Jaap Zevenbergen

More articles in Land Use Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joice Jiang ().