timppu: Can I ask roughtly where (e.g. is it the Helsinki area, some smaller town or what), and how long have you been there? Is it from the private market, or from the state or e.g. HOAS?
Jyvaskyla, not in the very center of it, but within ~5km of Matkahuolto and <3km from shops like Prisma, Citymarket, Lidl, etc. It's from private market and I moved in just a couple months ago.
timppu: I think in Finland you can get housing benefits for paying for mortgage interest payments and the housing costs, but not for the loan payments (cutting down the mortgage). And that makes perfect sense to me as paying for the mortgage is in fact about buying property, so it would be odd if the housing benefit would cover that too.
I don't know if it's so weird to cover buying property. There benefits already in place are already supposed to cover food, clothes, some travel, etc. Either way you have to live somewhere, and unless you already own a house and have paid the mortgage off, you're going to have to spend a certain amount of money on your place to live, whether rented or owned. And if you can't pay that money, you need some help. Now again, what's so bad about supporting the purchase of property through benefits?
Think of it from a different angle: if you support rent through benefits, where does that money go? Quite possibly in the hands of a private landlord. What can he do with the income? Whatever. Like buy property. So saying that it isn't reasonable to support the purchase of property through the benefits system is in contradiction with the fact that the money spent on supporting rent payments can still end up supplying private property, just for some other person. At the very least, to have some consistency, shouldn't they then limit these benefits to state owned housing only?