The Economic Impact of Projected Affordable Housing Developments: Does the Supply Side Matter?

A key current objective of Scottish policymakers is to increase the availability of affordable and social housing, with an expectation that this will have both societal and economic impacts. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the potential economic impacts of meeting the projections of affordable housing needed in Scotland to combat homelessness. Typical economic impact assessments of social housing investment have focused exclusively on the effect of expenditures on demand, using input-output models (IO). However, recently some have argued that housing, like transport, should be treated as a type of infrastructure investment that is likely also to have potential supply side impacts – such as an increase in both labour supply and productivity. In this paper, we use both IO and Computable Generable Equilibrium (CGE) models to evaluate the economic impact of social housing investment, with a particular emphasis on the supply side impacts.