Affordability Crisis Research Articles

Financial Toxicity and the Growing Affordability Crisis.

Financial Toxicity and the Growing Affordability Crisis.

The Future of Nursing 2020–2030: Charting a path to achieve health equity

The Future of Nursing 2020–2030: Charting a path to achieve health equity

OER State Policy Discourse: Adding Equity to the Cost Savings Conversation

In response to rising tuition, state disinvestment, and financial uncertainty over the years, open educational resources (OER) have been introduced as a solution to address the college affordability crisis (Colvard et al., 2018). The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) sees OER as not just a way to lift the financial burden of educational materials, but also as a path to improving teaching and learning, strengthening the economy, advancing societal goals, and breaking down barriers to education (SPARC, n.d.-b). State policymakers have created grant programs or other initiatives to incentivize the creation, use, or expansion of OER in an effort to decrease costs associated with postsecondary education. This raises the question of how state policy discourse defines the problem that then informs the solutions addressed in OER legislation and how introducing an equity discourse into OER policy making can strengthen efforts to remove barriers to higher education.

Options for states to constrain pricing power of health care providers.

Health care is becoming increasingly unaffordable for both individuals and employers and prices vary in nearly incomprehensible ways that do not correlate with quality. In many areas, consolidation of insurers and providers resulted in market failure that needs policy interventions. With federal gridlock, state policymakers are seeking options for controlling health care costs in markets where competition has failed. In this article, we discuss a spectrum of options that policymakers have to more directly control healthcare prices: (1) establishing a cost-growth benchmark, (2) creating a public option, (3) capping or establishing a default out-of-network payment rate for health care services, (4) creating affordability standards that authorize the insurance commissioner to reject contracts with excessive rate increases, (5) creating global budgets for hospital-based care, (6) capping excessive prices and/or tiering allowed rate updates, and (7) creating a population-based payment model. We provide a roadmap for state policymakers to consider these options, review the experiences with states who have tried these models, and discuss additional design considerations that policymakers should consider with any of these models. In the 1970's and 1980's, during a time of rapid growth in health care prices and spending, states took a decisive leadership role in developing regulatory models to curb the growth in health care costs and improve affordability for their citizens. It is time for states to lead the nation once again in addressing the current health care cost and affordability crisis in the U.S.

Immigrant neighborhoods and eviction: Hidden housing crisis?

Poor renting families are experiencing the worst affordable housing crisis in decades. Although there is evidence of high eviction rates, in part due to this affordability crisis, the housing literature only recently began to examine this phenomenon. As a relatively new area of inquiry, the eviction literature has some glaring gaps. First, most studies are qualitative and focus on one locality at a time. Second, to our knowledge, no U.S.- based studies investigate eviction rates in immigrant neighborhoods. We aim to fill these gaps by using the Eviction Lab database and American Community Survey Data to determine whether there is an association between neighborhood-level eviction filing and eviction rates and the presence of immigrants in the neighborhood, after controlling for other neighborhood factors. At the national level, we find that neighborhoods with an increase in the U.S. and foreign-born non-white populations have significantly higher eviction filing and eviction rates than neighborhoods with U.S.- born non-Hispanic white residents. Within race/ethnic groups, variation by nativity seems to reflect larger segregation and settlement patterns of U.S. and foreign-born minority populations. In low immigrant cities, Black immigrants are more vulnerable to eviction than any other group.

Affordable Regulation: New York City Rent Stabilization as Housing Affordability Policy

The growing housing affordability crisis is at the center of conversations about U.S. inequality. This paper reconsiders the role of rent stabilization as one important affordability tool. We investigate who is most likely to benefit from rent stabilization, how much non-stabilized renters would save if their units were stabilized, and the extent to which stabilization would reduce rent burden among households. Using New York City Housing Vacancy Survey data and employing logistic and hedonic regression techniques, we show that Hispanic and foreign-born householders are more likely to live in rent-stabilized units and find evidence of both rent savings and rent burden reduction when comparing stabilized tenants with their non-stabilized counterparts. We argue that expanded rent stabilization could be paired with policies that stimulate new construction to simultaneously curb rent inflation, protect current populations from displacement, and increase housing supply.

Conceptualising the commons as a relational triad: Lessons from the grant of use cooperative housing model in Barcelona

The current crisis of housing affordability in urban environments has drawn the attention of geographers to housing commons. This paper provides a conceptual and operational framework for an empirical study of housing commons. In thinking about the commons as a ‘relational triad’ involving a resource (the object), and community (the actors) and a form of organisation (the activity), I argue that housing commons are hybrid, imperfect social processes that escape binary scrutiny. Drawing on the findings of a research project that took place between 2017 and 2021, I focus on an emerging form of self-managed cooperative housing in the city of Barcelona, known as the ‘grant of use model’. I dwell on the contradictory nature of self-management in the context of a social reproduction crisis. Housing commons can be conducive to solidaristic communities and non-individualist subjectivities outside the financialisation of everyday life via mortgaged homeownership. However, the time and emotional investment required to self-develop housing projects in highly regulated, neoliberal urban spaces are not available for everyone. Housing commons require a favourable political context, economic resources, social connections and technical knowledge, which prevent democratic access. I analyse the origin and causes of exclusionary boundaries surrounding these housing commons to understand how these boundaries can be softened. Departing from disembedded conceptualisations of the commons, I show what type of public-common partnerships and innovative policies can make housing commons more inclusive without renouncing principles such as self-organisation and autonomy.

Australia’s Energy Security and Statecraft in an Era of Strategic Competition

Previously published studies on Australia’s energy security did not examine the country’s domestic energy security situation in tandem with its international energy statecraft. This paper fills this research gap. In order to provide a robust analysis of a country’s strategic options in the energy sector, it is paramount to balance domestic and international dimensions, along with internal and external factors. The paper utilizes the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) method to review Australia’s strategic options by balancing the inward-looking, domestic risk minimization dimension (energy security), with the outward-looking, international power projection dimension (energy statecraft). The paper also applies the 4A framework (availability, accessibility, affordability, and acceptance) to assess Australia’s energy security performance. On the one hand, the results demonstrate that Australia has many strengths and opportunities as a reliable and stable energy supplier, endowed with traditional and renewable energy resources, and critical minerals. On the other hand, numerous internal weaknesses and external threats may affect Australia’s strategic options in the future. The most pressing issue is the historical lack of strategic government intervention in the energy market, which has, paradoxically, resulted in domestic energy accessibility and affordability crisis. The market-based approach is also the main reason why Australia has not transformed its energy resources into capabilities to be used as instruments of statecraft. The paper uses the SWOT analysis and the 4A assessment as the basis for discussion on how Australia can transform its energy sector weaknesses and threats into strengths and opportunities, to benefit the national interest.

Sorting (and costing) the way out of the housing affordability crisis in Auckland, New Zealand

PurposeThis paper aims to explore the impact of the joint operation of affordability policies and whether their impact is meaningful relative to the size of the affordability crisis. Its purpose is to construct the features of a comprehensive policy package linked to a measurable outcome: solving the affordability crisis in Auckland. This study investigates the scale and nature of an affordability package that responds to three research and policy questions: What should the rate of annual growth of affordable housing be to solve the affordability crisis? Consequently, how long would it take to solve it? And how much would that policy package cost?Design/methodology/approachIn this paper, the authors argue that the disjoint operation of affordability policies is one of the reasons why their impacts relative to the size of the affordability crisis has been small or negligible. Furthermore, this study demonstrates that affordability is as much about raising households’ incomes as it is about lowering housing prices. This study uses a modelling-based framework to simulate some of the levers that local and central governments have to affect housing prices and affordability: direct intervention on the supply-side and subsidies. Specifically, this simulates retention-and-targeting (RT) programs and subsidies to raise deposits via shared ownership (SO) schemes.FindingsThis study finds that solving the affordability crisis would take a decade if the supply of affordable housing increases by at least 45% annually. With the introduction of RT and SO programs, it could still be solved within a decade, where the required growth rate decreases to 35%. However, for growth rates between 5% and 10%, the policy goal is met in approximately 40 years, and the SO program becomes exceedingly expensive.Originality/valueHousing affordability is one of the hottest policy issues in New Zealand and the developed world. In the past decade, a number of affordability policies have been introduced with limited success due to their lack of interoperability and siloed efforts. Results in this paper should be interpreted as the boundaries of what is feasible and realistic in the realm of affordability policies. Therefore, its contribution relies on investigating the multiple effects if the financial, administrative and political barriers to RT and SO programs could be overcome. Its scope is a blueprint for the design of policies in other cities where unaffordability has become extreme.

Housing affordability crisis and vulnerable social groups in Turkey

PurposeThis paper investigates the housing affordability crisis from the perspective of vulnerable social groups (VSG) in Turkey and Turkey's megacities, Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir, over the period of 2010 and 2019.Design/methodology/approachThe author employ house cost and multiple income variables, involving residual income, to construct socially informative house cost-to-income (HCI) ratios. To measure the country/urban level socio-economic dimensions of the affordability crisis, the author develop 12 main and 76 specific housing affordability criteria.FindingsThe author find that housing is not affordable in Turkey and low/unequal distribution of income is a contributive factor for the affordability crisis of VSG. The evidence suggests that housing unaffordability for VSG is deeply rooted in the socio-economic/demographic disparities that eventually result in income and homeownership inequalities.Social implicationsConstructed HCI ratios provide precise information for the targeted housing affordability policies for the VSG defined by education level, age, location, income distribution, employment status/condition and gender. The author' socially targeted modeling approach briefly suggests that housing affordability policies should focus on low-educated groups, young generations, some elementary occupations, employees in low-income industries, and casual/regular-small firms' employees.Originality/valueThis is the first study that provides nuanced information on housing affordability for Turkey by employing HCI ratios for the targeted VSG. This socially targeted empirical analysis is the first analysis for developing housing markets as well. From the methodological perspective, the author contribute information quality of the housing affordability ratio by using income data of various aggregate-level socio-economic/demographic groups.

Role of Empathy in Engineering Education and Practice in North America

Does engineering design education in North America prepare students to address the major issues of our time? In today’s political and social climate, engineers are part of multi-disciplinary teams tasked with finding solutions to complex issues like poverty, climate change, the housing affordability crisis, resource depletion, and water shortages. By definition, these problems are “wicked”. If engineers are to play a role in addressing issues that exist at the intersection of technology and society, they must have a deep understanding of both technical competencies and of human factors. They must have the ability to empathize. In consideration of today’s social, political, and environmental challenges, it has never been more important to instill social competencies into engineering education and practice, particularly around engineering design. This paper analyzes the previous literature on empathy in engineering education in North America and synthesizes the data to present the conceptualization that engineers have of empathy in education and practice.

Food system activism and the housing crisis

The affordable housing crisis in the United States is leaving millions of Americans homeless or spend­ing over one-third of their income on rent, a con­di­tion housing scholars refer to as ‘shelter poverty.’ This problem has clear linkages to the food system in terms of the cost and condition of food workers’ housing, the availability of food in low-income neighborhoods, the relationship between food and housing policy, and how much money households have available to provision themselves after paying rent. This commentary explores four aspects of the relationship between the U.S. food and housing systems: the contradiction between abundance and scarcity; the role of racism and coloniality in creat­ing these systems; the role of the government and public policy in maintaining and supporting these systems; and how stigma affixes itself to both the hungry and the shelter-poor. Incorporating hous­ing as part of food system work can strengthen both ongoing movements and unite scholars and activists in exploring the on-the-ground living experiences of people across the country.

Housing affordability and commute distance

ABSTRACT The growing affordable housing crisis in high-cost metropolitan areas may force households to seek lower cost housing in the outer reaches of metropolitan areas contributing to the recent increase in commute distance. To explore this assertion, we test the relationship between the availability of affordable housing relative to jobs and commute distance in two diverse metropolitan statistical areas in Southern California: Los Angeles-Orange (higher cost, coastal, older, more urban) and Riverside-San Bernardino (lower cost, inland, newer, more suburban). A worse “fit” between the number of low-wage jobs and affordable housing rentals is associated with longer commute distances in LA-Orange, but is not statistically significant in Riverside-San Bernardino. This study’s findings highlight the differences in housing dynamics and commute distances between higher cost coastal regions and lower cost inland regions—and underscore the importance of protecting and expanding the supply of affordable housing in job-rich neighborhoods located in more expensive, coastal cities.

Affordability Crisis and Gentrification in FDI Export-Led Economies: Prices in the Demanddriven Housing Market of Cluj-Napoca

Abstract This paper examines the rapid increase of prices in the residential sector of Cluj-Napoca in the context of the housing affordability crisis (Wetzstein, 2017). By using insight from the Growth Regimes literature, we look at the internal demand as a main driver of rapid price rise. As Kohl and Spielau (2018) argue, the monetary conditions needed for export-led growth regimes are restricting the outputs of the construction sector, creating under-supplied, demand-driven housing markets. We propose three alternative hypotheses regarding the major agent driving the prices within the city as major source of demand: the employees in knowledge-intensive services, the diffuse regional savings of employees in search for some yields, the specialized real estate investors. We use OLS and spatial regression (lag and error) to model the price per square meter using the social composition of the neighbourhoods, the within and out-of-town origin of investors, and the source of money (bank loans vs. cash payment) to demonstrate that the existing crisis is driven by the middle class’s savings that also benefits from gentrification, while speculative investments in the housing markets are rather limited.

Finance, food, and future urban zones: The failure of flexible development in Auckland, New Zealand

As the pace of urbanization across the planet accelerates, planners and policymakers in the world’s fast-growing cities are faced with an intractable conflict between the endless demand for more land to be released for development and the need to preserve ecosystem services and productive agricultural land close to urban centres. Auckland is by far the largest and fastest-growing city in New Zealand, and the rapid pace of residential and commercial development onto greenfield land is putting pressure on less profitable land uses in peri-urban areas. Despite good intentions from city planners to create a high standard of compact urban development in the existing urban footprint, urban sprawl and land fragmentation continue to envelop the rural communities that lie at the edge of Auckland. This paper examines how the policy of flexible development – where zoning provisions for current and future development can be overruled by government and by private applicants in the name of accommodating the ever-greater demand for new residential development - enables developers and landowners to circumvent zoning conventions for the sake of profitability at the expense of long-term quality of life for all of Auckland’s residents, with questionable positive effect on addressing Auckland’s housing crisis as property prices increase at unprecedented rates. To demonstrate this, this paper draws from planning documents, court decisions and fieldwork in Northwest Auckland. it argues that New Zealand’s crisis of housing affordability and urban sprawl is explicitly financial in nature and benefits some parties as much as it causes great detriment to many others, and therefore must be confronted as such.

Affordable Housing and City Welfare

Abstract Housing affordability is the main policy challenge for most large cities in the world. Zoning changes, rent control, housing vouchers, and tax credits are the main levers employed by policymakers. How effective are they at combatting the affordability crisis? We build a dynamic stochastic spatial equilibrium model to evaluate the effect of these policies on the well-being of its citizens. The model endogenizes house prices, rents, construction, labour supply, output, income, and wealth inequality, the location decisions of households within the city as well as inter-city migration. Its main novel features are risk, risk aversion, and incomplete risk-sharing. We calibrate the model to the New York metropolitan statistical area. Housing affordability policies carry substantial insurance value but affect aggregate housing and labour supply and cause misallocation in labour and housing markets. Housing affordability policies that enhance access to this insurance especially for the neediest households create substantial net welfare gains.

Changes in Housing Discourse in Four Czech Municipalities. Will Young People Get Support?

In post-communist countries, the early years of housing policy after 1989 were characterised by the withdrawal of the state. Municipalities played an important role in the housing privatisation process in the Czech Republic. Thirty years later, a global boom in housing prices occurred in major urban centres. Young people are facing the problem of decreasing housing affordability. The analyses of the programme statements of electoral parties and coalition agreements in selected regional centres reveals the issue’s increasing saliency as well as a change in the overall discourse of housing. Moreover, local path dependencies and ways of bridging ideological differences in a coalition are explained. Electoral programmes tend to focus on young families rather than young people in general. In the crisis of housing affordability, those groups that have something to offer cities are preferred in party programme statements.

“Housing is such a major part of someone’s life”: mental health social work practice in the context of a housing affordability crisis

ABSTRACT It is well-known that people with psychiatric diagnoses experience disproportionate rates of homelessness. However, few studies have explored the perspectives and practices of mental health social workers in responding to clients experiencing homelessness. This article reports on findings from three focus groups with inpatient mental health social workers in Sydney, Australia. Three themes were identified: stuck in a crisis; reliance on sub-standard housing conditions; and pressures to discharge. The study reveals the challenges experienced by social workers in navigating scarce housing resources, and the limitations of a biomedical paradigm in failing to address the social determinants of mental distress.

Housing affordability: an econometric framing for policy discussions

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to analyze short- and long-run market-sensitive drivers of housing affordability. The study highlights an ongoing housing affordability crisis in an emerging market context by also providing an empirical tool to combat the crisis.Design/methodology/approachTo investigate determinants of uniquely constructed effective housing affordability index and house price to income ratio index, the author uses a bound testing approach to cointegration and error correction models, besides causality tests, variance decompositions and impulse response functions. This study uses Turkish data for the period of 2007 M06 and 2017 M12.FindingsThe evidence suggests that the housing affordability crisis is mainly driven by credit expansion, rent and construction costs. A sensible housing policy response would target these variables. This evidence suggests that housing affordability mostly depends on housing market dynamics rather than policies because of the exogeneous/cyclical natures of the drivers.Research limitations/implicationsData constraints shape the study. A regional or an aggregate-level panel study cannot be developed because of a lack of data. This limitation inevitably results in the exclusion of relevant socio-economic/political factors and is also the main reason for the lack of comparative analysis in a cross-country setting.Practical implicationsThis study argues that dependency on neoliberal housing market practices seems the underlying reason for the lack of efficient policy answers and the ongoing affordability crisis. From a policymaking perspective, the study suggests that necessary policy measures to resolve the housing affordability crisis may give a specific emphasis on housing rent, housing credit volume and construction costs as the major components of the crisis.Originality/valueThis study develops a novel measure and presents a new conceptual framework by combining quantitative research methods and policymaking in housing affordability. In this respect, to the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first work to comparatively investigate the determinants of uniquely developed monthly housing affordability measurements.

An Affordable Identity—Customisation Prior to Housing Construction in Australia

This paper presents a study that explores an affordable housing scheme which allows customisation prior to construction for owner-occupiers. Due to ongoing concerns about the economic fallout caused by the COVID-19 pandemic affecting large populations, the demand for affordable housing is increasing. In particular, low-income households continue to struggle with unaffordable rents throughout major Australian cities. Assailed by this growing affordability crisis and deemed environmentally unsustainable, Australian suburbs are in need of revitalisation. The implementation of mass customisation solutions can heighten the sense of identity within a community and also significantly increase occupant satisfaction. However, presently, there is a lack of studies discussing the financial model and design of affordable mass customisation solutions for housing. To address that gap, this paper employs the method of case studies by analysing five relevant cases from the perspectives of affordability and customisation. The results of this study indicate that there is great room for future improvement in what is currently claimed to be defined as affordable housing, in terms of both affordability and customisation. These results will potentially assist and provide guidance to future architects, developers and planners.