Intricately linked to state land use policies and real estate management, housing policy – the state regulation, finance and allocation of housing – is, among other things, a crucial tool of the state to prevent and mitigate socio-spatial inequalities. In the context of the Nordic welfare state, the housing market was for a while understood as insufficient in ensuring an even distribution of quality housing and universal residential wellbeing. In the post-war era, Nordic welfare states’ various housing policies were implemented to provide correctives to the housing market's pervasively unequal outcomes (Bengtsson 2001). Housing was partly de-commodified and provided as affordable, high quality social housing for both working- and middle-class households. Sweden and Denmark had their own, vast social housing development programmes. In Finland, social housing construction boomed in the 1970s. As discussed in the opening to Part I of the book, during the development of social housing estates in Finnish cities, more than half of the total of 600,000 units built over the decade were state subsidised. However, there has been a significant shift across the Nordic region regarding the thinking on why and how the state should intervene in housing provision.

Today, housing provision in the Nordic context is guided by the notion that houses should primarily be treated as commodities bought, sold and rented on the private housing market (Tranøy et al. 2020). And, in the Finnish policy context, it is no longer the housing market as such that is seen as an inadequate means of housing provision, creating a plethora of housing related inequalities and hence being in need of state correctives.