ABSTRACT
There is an alarmingly low supply of affordable housing in most advanced economies, despite housing policy to support low-cost housing production being passed. Categorization and classification theory propose that shared analytical categories are conducive to a joint understanding of a situation as they act as heuristics and tools in cognitively overwhelming social realities. At the same time, categories and classification are inherently dynamic as, e.g., companies create new product categories or merge existing categories to promote their products. The so-called umbrella category of affordable housing includes a variety of lower-level product categories, including, e.g., rental units, community housing units, etc., and the study reported indicates that professional groups such as architects and urban development experts claim the moral authority to define and to prescribe aesthetic features of new affordable housing units. While affordable housing producers recognizes aesthetic features as a component in the homeowners’ housing welfare, they still question that right to interfere with housing project plans, especially if the aesthetic judgement passed incurs production costs and thus reduces the affordable housing stock and eo ipso undermines affordable housing policies.
