Defining and measuring the national housing needs.

Housing and health: Housing for people with special needs.

The elderly There is no magical age at which one becomes "old," and any special housing needs are never a consequence of age alone but rather of accompanying financial, mental, or physical disability. The old include some of our poorest, most vulnerable citizens-in 1986 a fifth of single pensioners lived in houses needing more than £1000 worth of urgent repairs to the external fabric.' But ther...

The National Housing Political System

National and Regional Housing Patterns

R esidential investment is one of the most volatile components of GDP. Coming out of a recession, it is not uncommon for residential investment to jump by more than 20 percent in a year. Going into a recession, it may fall by a similar fraction. Thus, while residential investment accounts for just 4 percent of GDP, it can have a disproportionate influence at critical junctures. Fluctuations in ...

Defining and Measuring Voice Quality

Although voices provide listeners with significant information about speakers, defining and measuring voice quality remain elusive goals. We argue that the much-maligned ANSI standard definition of sound quality is in fact an appropriate definition, because it treats quality as the result of a perceptual process rather than a fixed quantity, and highlights the interaction between listeners and ...

Reflections—Defining and Measuring Sustainability

There is a saying in business schools that ‘‘what gets measured, gets managed.’’ This is bad news for managing our natural capital and the interactions between our economic activity and the environment, which are key to sustainability: these are almost entirely unmeasured and often unmanaged too. None of the usual measures of economic performance—gross domestic product (GDP), unemployment, infl...