Housing Affordability Crisis Research Articles

Ethno-racial and nativity differences in the likelihood of living in affordable housing in Canada

Canadians are experiencing a housing affordability crisis, but little attention has been paid to its ethno-racial and nativity disparities. Using data from the 2016 Canadian Census, we assess whether the likelihood of living in unaffordable housing (i.e. spending 30% or more of pretax income on housing costs) varies by ethno-race and nativity status, and identify the social factors contributing to these differences. We show that Middle Eastern and North Africans (MENAs) are most, and Whites are least, likely to live in unaffordable housing. Results from decomposition analyses suggest that MENA individuals’ high unaffordable housing rates are largely attributable to their high unemployment rates. The high unaffordable housing rates of East and South Asians are mainly associated with their higher propensity to live in urban areas with expensive housing. Immigrants are generally more likely than Canadian-born co-ethnics to live in unaffordable housing. Blacks and Southeast Asians are exceptions. As many governments take steps to address housing affordability crises, they should curtail the influence of structural barriers that preclude ethno-racial minorities from living in affordable housing.

Why so moderate? Understanding millennials' views on the urban housing affordability crisis in the post-socialist context of the Czech Republic.

The housing affordability crisis is one of the most pressing issues in urban centres around the globe, affecting especially young adults. Some theorists have in response begun calling for the provision of more public housing or less housing financialisation (free market). The goal of our article is to demonstrate the housing attitudes of Czech millennials towards state interventions that are designed to address the decline in housing affordability, using a quantitative attitude survey and a series of qualitative interviews. The results of our study reveal that young Czechs are sceptical about increased public housing provision as a solution, and on the whole their views align more with the neoliberal ideas, the very ideas that are criticised by critical theorists. We show that there are contextual reasons that explain why young Czechs are not calling for radical policy change - reasons such as familialism, which facilitates the intergenerational transmission of norms, habitus, and resources within families; the legacy of socialism and society transformation; a belief that more redistribution of resources could be unfair; and stronger support for competition, individualism and right-wing politics. There is also, however, some inconsistency and uncertainty in their attitudes, especially between their general worldview and their suggestions for concrete action. This study contributes to the research in the field of youth studies that looks at young people's strategies for dealing with the problem of decreasing housing affordability, and to the discussions surrounding diverse housing policy responses to a common global challenge.

Shared and Crowded Housing in the Bay Area: Where Gentrification and the Housing Crisis Meet COVID-19

Amid the growing affordable housing crisis and widespread gentrification over the last decade, people have been moving less than before and increasingly live in shared and often crowded households across the U.S. Crowded housing has various negative health implications, including stress, sleep disorders, and infectious diseases. Difference-in-difference analysis of a unique, large-scale longitudinal consumer credit database of over 450,000 San Francisco Bay Area residents from 2002 to 2020 shows gentrification affects the probability of residents shifting to crowded households across the socioeconomic spectrum but in different ways than expected. Gentrification is negatively associated with low- socioeconomic status (SES) residents’ probability of entering crowded households, and this is largely explained by increased shifts to crowded households in neighborhoods outside of major cities showing early signs of gentrification. Conversely, gentrification is associated with increases in the probability that middle-SES residents enter crowded households, primarily in Silicon Valley. Lastly, crowding is positively associated with COVID-19 case rates, beyond density and socioeconomic and racial composition in neighborhoods, although the role of gentrification remains unclear. Housing policies that mitigate crowding can serve as early interventions in displacement prevention and reducing health inequities.

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.

Placing U.S. Federal Housing Policy on a Secure Foundation: The SHELTER Plan

Problem, research strategy, and findings U.S. housing advocates have called for a fundamental rethinking of the nation’s federal housing policies. In this study, I examined the geographic and household-level consequences of a plan that redistributes federal income tax expenditures from homeowners to very-low-income households. I propose, defend, and illustrate the effects of the SHELTER plan, a redistributive policy that a) is revenue neutral, b) is tenure neutral, c) is progressive, d) prioritizes local redistribution, and e) targets excess revenues to affordable housing production subsidies in communities where an increase in cash-based housing assistance is most likely to inflate housing rents. I demonstrate that the savings from the elimination of four homeownership tax expenditures would provide more than enough revenue to fund a universal housing allowance for all very-low-income households. Ignoring housing market adjustments, the plan would reduce housing cost burdens for the nation’s very-low-income renters by 36% and reduce very-low-income homeowners’ cost burdens by 28%. Takeaway for practice The SHELTER plan would provide a new foundation for local affordable housing and community development practice. Very-low-income households would receive a guaranteed housing allowance with no strings attached and local planners would have new roles in the design and implementation of localized solutions to the affordable housing crisis.

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.

Framing the housing crisis: How think-tanks frame politics and science to advance policy agendas

In England, think-tanks have played a crucial role in framing the causes of unaffordable housing. Yet the logics of think-tanks, the reasons why they intervene publicly in the way that they do, remain unclear. Drawing on the social field theory of Pierre Bourdieu, this paper seeks to understand the framing strategies of think-tanks. Based on quantitative and qualitative textual analysis of five years’ worth of public interventions from three think-tanks, this paper demonstrates how the framing strategy adopted by a think-tank – that is the causal narrative and policy agenda it promotes, and the means it uses to promote it- can be partly explained by the amount and types of capital it possesses as an organisation, and its respective ties to the fields of science, politics and the media. In doing so, the paper illuminates some of the key structural logics which explain why some framings of the affordable housing crisis dominate others in the public and political domains.

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.

Additional dwelling units: A potential solution to the affordable and senior housing crisis

As housing prices continue to rise faster than inflation and wages in the US, affordable housing continues to become difficult, borderline impossible for minimum wage and renter wage workers to obtain. This paper aims to explore the possibility of zoning regulations to allow the widespread construction of additional dwelling units (ADUs). Many macroeconomic factors continue to contribute to the unavailability of affordable housing. A combination of low wages, low housing stock and high property values contribute to the senior and affordable housing crises. The COVID-19 pandemic further exacerbated the impact of these factors on affordable housing. Low-income individuals and families were unequally affected by increased unemployment rates. Senior housing has become a more pressing issue as the senior population continues to increase and most seniors live on a low monthly income based on pensions and assets. This makes it difficult for the majority of seniors to continue to afford where they were living when they were fully employed and removes the option of aging in place. ADUs provide a unique solution to both the senior and affordable housing crises through increasing housing stock in pre-existing areas and neighbourhoods. This is done through the reduction of zoning restrictions by local governments to allow homeowners to convert detached garages and basements into apartment dwellings. This gives the homeowners a potential source of monthly income through rentals, as well as increasing housing stock in pre-existing areas. ADUs can contribute towards the necessary increase in senior and affordable housing to combat their respective crises.

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.

Bringing permanent affordable housing and community control to scale: The potential of community land trust and land bank collaboration

Community land trusts (CLTs) are a unique model of shared equity homeownership that promote equitable development and empower homebuyers in historically exclusive real estate markets. As a timely study about the potential future governance around affordable housing, the multiple case studies here identify places that have both a CLT and land bank, and where nascent initiatives by local governments focused on creating permanent affordable housing are facilitating collaborations between local CLTs and land banks. By exploring the themes and dynamics of these emerging collaborations with qualitative methods, the authors evaluate how CLTs can leverage collaborations with land banks as a tool to scale up permanent affordable housing and community control. Understanding how CLTs may benefit from collaborations with land banks is timely considering the current affordable housing crisis and an increasingly widespread recognition of systemic inequitable access to property ownership.

“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.

Housing Market Interventions and Residential Mobility in the San Francisco Bay Area

This study seeks to fill this gap by examining the impacts of market-rate development, subsidized development, and tenant protections, including rent stabilization and just cause for evictions protections, on movers. Specifically, this study builds two unique and cross-validated datasets on mobility and links them to a bespoke block-level housing construction database. We use granular data on individual and household mobility to assess how specific housing interventions impact both direct and indirect displacement by looking at moves both out of and into neighborhoods with different characteristics in the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area. Our research reveals that new market-rate construction in a neighborhood results in a slight increase in people of all income levels moving in and moving out, i.e., churn. The increase in rates of displacement (involuntary moves) for very low- to moderate-socio-economic groups is not as high as commonly feared, at 0.5% to 2% above normal rates. However, the highest socio-economic group disproportionately benefits from new market-rate housing production—they are the least likely to move out and the most likely to move into neighborhoods with new construction. We also find that rent stabilization and just cause eviction protections help residents of the lowest socio-economic status remain in their neighborhoods. At the same time, these protections may have exclusionary impacts as we find that fewer low-income people move into neighborhoods with tenant protections. Together, these findings suggest that equitable solutions to the housing crisis will require more than just upzoning and tenant protections—these are complementary solutions, but not enough. Preserving unsubsidized affordable housing and substantially expanding social housing would help mitigate displacement and exclusion while addressing the housing affordability crisis through market rate housing production and tenant protections. Social housing is the provision of rental or homeownership units affordable at a moderate income or below, and is run by a public or nonprofit entity. To work, it would need to be widely implemented, requiring government investment at levels that match the urgency of the housing crisis. What follows is a short summary of the main findings of the study. Practitioner-oriented findings on the implications of new production, subsidized development, and tenant protections will be presented in a series of forthcoming policy briefs by the authors.

“The Rent Eats First”: Rental Housing Unaffordability in the United States

The United States is in a housing affordability crisis, with nearly half of all renter households spending more than 30% of their incomes on rent and utilities each month. This traditional measure of housing affordability may understate the hardships renter households face because it does not consider the array of expenses households have. Whereas housing policy has relied on percentage-of-income measures to indicate whether housing is affordable, researchers over the last three decades have called for a residual income approach that uses spending estimates to calculate what a household can actually afford. This article examines the extent of the affordability crisis by comparing standard cost burden rates for working-age renter households with residual-income cost burdens. Using the Economic Policy Institute’s Family Budget Calculator and the 2018 American Community Survey, we estimate the number of renter households that do not have enough income to afford a comfortable standard of living after paying rent and utilities. We investigate several policy levers, finding that a combined policy that addresses both housing and transportation affordability would have the largest impact on reducing residual-income cost burdens.

Commute distance and jobs-housing fit

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the affordable housing crisis is forcing households to seek lower cost housing in the outer reaches of major metropolitan areas, helping to explain recent increases in commute distance. To test this relationship, we use spatial regression to examine the relationship between the availability of affordable housing in close proximity to jobs (jobs-housing fit) and commute distance in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The analysis draws on 2015 Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) Origin–Destination Employment Statistics (LODES) by workplace supplemented with data from the 2013–2017 5-Year American Community Survey on affordable housing units. We find substantial variation in jobs-housing fit across Los Angeles neighborhoods. The imbalance is greatest in higher-income neighborhoods located along the coast and in Orange County, south of Los Angeles. Controlling for other determinants of commute distance, a higher ratio of jobs to affordable housing is associated with longer distance commutes. To address growing commute distances, policymakers must greatly expand and protect the supply of long-term rental housing particularly in job-rich neighborhoods.