Housing Affordability: Local and National Perspectives

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...

Housing Affordability and Smart Growth in Calgary

Housing affordability and investments in children

This paper uses the 2004–2009 Consumer Expenditure Surveys to examine whether housing affordability affects expenditures on children in families with income at or below 200% of the poverty line. After accounting for selection using propensity score matching, estimating effects using nonlinear GLM, and performing sensitivity tests, we find that child enrichment expenditures have an inverted U-sh...

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...