Those horrible housing costs in Finland

I often see people complaining how housing is exceptionally expensive in Finland. And of course, everyone has that feeling. Therefore I was slightly surprised when I started to look at the European statistics regarding housing. A research briefing "HOUSING AFFORDABILITY IN THE EU" by European Social Housing Observatory  puts things into context.

Most Finnish public discourse about housing is about how expensive housing is. For instance:

• a poll of the public and municipal decision-makers, conducted by buy-a-right-to-let-associations, says that the basic challenges are high costs and lack of reasonably priced housing
• 88 % of population and 83 % of municipal decision-makers believe that high housing cost is the most important housing-political challenge

However, when we look at the research briefing and consider housing costs as percentage of disposable income, Finland is in the lower end of the EU27: 

I find this actually remarkable, because we have rather extreme climate conditions, which means comparatively higher construction costs.

And when we look at the impact of housing costs on the poor, Finland is even more towards the left-end of the statistics:

This means that only in Malta and Portugal there are fewer households overburdened by housing costs (meaning that a household uses more than 40 % of disposable income on housing). So we not only have lower housing costs compared to purchasing power than most EU countries, we also have more transfers of money to the poor households than e.g. Italy, Austria or Luxembourg.

Perhaps we should understand the European reality in more depth before complaining that much.