Helsinki alueittain 2004 verkkojulkaisuja

Helsinki after the millennium
In the 1990s, Helsinki’s population grew by
65,000 people, i.e. by 6,000 a year on average.
In 2000, however, this growth stopped
completely, owing partly to a decreasing migration
surplus from the rest of Finland, partly
to growing migration losses to surrounding
municipalities. Foreign migration, however,
still gives a surplus, and the number of births
is greater than the number of deaths.
The decreasing appeal of the Helsinki Region
is, primarily, a consequence of the employment
situation. The upswing that followed
the economic depression of the early 1990s
created growth in the big university cities in
Finland, particularly in the Helsinki region,
where employment grew drastically. Helsinki
has the greatest accumulation of business enterprise
in the country, and it has dominated
the fastest growing production sector, namely
the information sector. Information services
and production of information content, in particular,
are strongly concentrated in the Helsinki
Region. So when growth weakened in the
information sector, employment in the region
was immediately affected. Employment started
increasing more slowly and, at times, employment
increased faster in other parts of
Finland than the capital.
Helsinki’s loss of inhabitants to its neighbours
is, of course, nothing new: in the 1970s,
especially, many people moved out to new
housing estates in the periphery, and the
1980s were a time of very slow population
growth in Helsinki. But in the 1990s, immigration
and thereby population growth picked up
again, with 18-29 year olds providing the
greatest influx. Today, many of these people
are in the process of moving to a bigger home,
often in a peripheral municipality where housing
prices are more affordable. Current low
EU interest rates also stimulate investment in
larger homes.
Population growth in Helsinki and the
Helsinki Region
Helsinki has long since grown beyond its borders,
and today its labour and housing market
or commuting area, which is usually referred
to as the Helsinki Region, comprises a dozen
municipalities (those four of the Helsinki Metropolitan
Area + eight adjacent municipalities),
with a total of 1.25 million inhabitants.
After Helsinki became the national capital in
1812, its population doubled at 20-30 year intervals
up to the 1960s, when this growth moved
over to the nearby municipalities. People
looked for more spacious housing outside the
city boundaries. After the “escape from the
countryside” in the 1960s, a calmer period set
in, to be followed by a new rapid population
increase in the region. This growth, however,
gradually ebbed away, and turned into a slight
population drain in 1989, at a time when
economy was still red hot. One reason why
people moved away was the big difference in
housing prices between the capital and other
parts of Finland. Another was that the Helsinki
Region could not provide sufficient rented
housing. Migration from the region increased.
A new period of growth started in the early
1990s, when migration from abroad grew
very significantly, too. Furthermore, a 1994
amendment to the law on municipality of residence
made it possible for students and other
temporary residents to register themselves in
a municipality. To Helsinki, this meant an approximated
increase of 10,000-15,000 inhabitants.
In the latter half of the 1990s, Helsinki’s
population grew particularly due to recovering
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