Housing Affordability in Metropolitan Areas. The Application of a Combination of the Ratio Income and Residual Income Approaches to Two Case Studies in Sicily, Italy

Grazia Napoli

doi:10.3390/buildings7040095

Abstract

Housing affordability problems have become more serious over the course of the last few decades and are now also affecting the middle-class, despite the fall in prices on the housing market. This study proposes a methodology to assess threshold-income as an index for measuring housing affordability by applying a combination of the ratio income and residual income approaches. The methodology is applied to two particular areas of Sicily in Italy as case studies consisting of medium-size metropolitan areas located in a less developed European region. The areas have been chosen on the basis of their different territorial structure: a polarized area that comprises a high-density city centre and a polynuclear urban region. The results are diversified for income level, as well as for town and urban zone, and allow us to compare the housing affordability problems between towns belonging to the same metropolitan area.

Highlights

Though metropolitan and post-metropolitan areas have different territorial structures in that the former comprises a high-density city centre with urban sprawl in its hinterlands, while the latter comprises a polynuclear urban region, in both areas, residential and economic activities are strongly interconnected with mobility and communication infrastructures, owing to continuous flows of people, commodities, information, capital, and investment
Each town contributes to the ‘external competitiveness’ of the metropolitan area to which it belongs against other urban regions in terms of its abilities to attract inhabitants, capital, and services, whilst at the same time facing the internal competitiveness within the very metropolitan area itself, according to its own demographic and economic ranking, which may attract more investment and migratory flows [7,8]
With regard to the aforementioned diverse uses of housing affordability (Section 2), the aim of this study is to provide a methodology for assessing housing affordability in metropolitan areas and for mapping the territorial distribution of the resulting threshold-income, which may be incorporated into regional and urban planning, as well as into public decision-making processes for introducing specific targeted measures on housing

Summary

Introduction

Though metropolitan and post-metropolitan areas have different territorial structures in that the former comprises a high-density city centre with urban sprawl in its hinterlands, while the latter comprises a polynuclear urban region, in both areas, residential and economic activities are strongly interconnected with mobility and communication infrastructures, owing to continuous flows of people, commodities, information, capital, and investment. These flows follow dynamics that modify the economic and demographic relationships that generate the growth or decline of towns or metropolitan territories [1,2,3]. Each town contributes to the ‘external competitiveness’ of the metropolitan area to which it belongs against other urban regions in terms of its abilities to attract inhabitants, capital, and services, whilst at the same time facing the internal competitiveness within the very metropolitan area itself, according to its own demographic and economic ranking, which may attract more investment and migratory flows [7,8].

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion