Housing affordability: Is new local supply the key?

Local Economic Conditions and the Nature of New Housing Supply

We explore the impact of local economic conditions on the type and size of newly constructed housing. A slightly modified standard open monocentric city model predicts that, as long as land use regulation is relatively lax, positive local income shocks cause construction of more multifamily housing and smaller units. Exploiting metro area-level American Housing Survey (AHS) data from 1984 to 20...

Housing Affordability in Italy

From the early ‘70s the Italian families improved their welfare, raising the national dwelling standard level. During the same period, for several reasons, the rental market share on the total housing stock decreased from 40% to less that 20%. The situation was mainly caused, on the one hand, by some structural changes introduced in the leasing contracts, and, on the other hand, by some incenti...

Measuring Housing Affordability in Beijing

Housing affordability is the relationship between households’ income and housing expenditure. The public are very concerned about the high price of residential housing in Beijing, which is considered go beyond the income of average citizens. In order to fully understand the China’s real estate market, the paper first analyses the land policy, housing reform and housing finance, etc. Then this p...

The Effect of Demand and Supply fac- tors on the Affordability of Housing

A Housing Affordability Standard for the UK

Since 1990 there has been extensive exploration of the meaning of housing affordability by members of the academic, professional and advocacy communities in Britain. These debates have revealed weaknesses in the traditional ratio standard of affordability and led to arguments in support of an alternative, residual income concept of affordability. However, so far there has been only limited succ...