Rental Affordability Research Articles

Post-Pandemic Rental Housing Affordability Economics in the U.S., U.K., & Canada

<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 14pt;">Rental unaffordability is defined as spending more than 30% of a household’s gross income on rent. Post-pandemic inflation and interest rate increases have intensified rental unaffordability. This research examines rental affordability in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada. It also explores the effect of renters’ “affordability knowledge” – defined as the expertise tenants have and use to make economical rental housing choices – on rent expenditure and affordability positioning and compares personal finances, economic perspectives, and demographics based on renters in affordable and unaffordable situations. The results show that nearly two-thirds of the renters studied are in unaffordable rental situations. Interestingly, affordability knowledge was found to reduce rent spent and increase affordability situations. Significant demographic differences were found between those in affordable and unaffordable rental situations, including rent spending, food spending, transportation spending, savings, perceived homeownership likelihood, and age. The research offers important insight into current rental affordability economics, recommendations for policymakers, and opportunities for real estate organizations.</span></p>

The incongruence between objective and subjective rental affordability: Does residential satisfaction matter?

Addressing the rental affordability problem requires defining and measuring ‘affordability’ accurately. A variety of objective and subjective indicators have been suggested to measure rental affordability. However, several studies demonstrated that objective and subjective measures of rental affordability are not well aligned with each other, and the underlying cause of this mismatch is unknown. Drawing on Noll's (2013) objective and subjective social indicator framework, this paper examines the extent to which the objectively and subjectively measured levels of rental affordability are incongruent and the driver of the disparity. Using the longitudinal data of the Labor and Income Panel Study in Korea (2015–2020), we conducted a series of panel multinominal logistic regressions with fixed effects. The results show that there is a significant mismatch between objective and subjective rental affordability, and this incongruence is partly due to residential satisfaction, which influences subjective rental affordability. The paper calls for more in-depth exploration of residential satisfaction to benefit refined and nuanced policies to address rental affordability problems.

RENT-BURDENED IN THE SOUTH? A NEIGHBORHOOD-SCALE ANALYSIS OF DIVERSITY AND IMMIGRANTS IN NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE

ABSTRACT Rental affordability has become a major concern for most Americans since the 2007–2009 recession. Minorities and immigrants, especially in some emerging destination metropolises, have suffered disproportionally from its brunt. Nashville—a prominent southern destination—has not only experienced a considerable gain in diverse immigrant groups, but it has also witnessed skyrocketing housing prices and rents, making them beyond the affordability of even middle-class Americans. Rent burden patterns among racial/ethnic groups, especially the immigrants/foreign-born who are not yet citizens, remain largely unknown. Given Nashville’s suitability as an emerging metropolis reverberating as a nationally representative immigrant gateway, this article explores relationships between rent burden faced by immigrants and other racial/ethnic groups while examining neighborhood-level determinants captured in principal components derived from demographic, socioeconomic, occupation, and built-environment attributes. A newly devised rent burden index—previously applied for metropolises only—is calibrated to census tracts to test its validity in explaining intraurban variabilities. Through multitiered statistical and cartographic approaches, we find that the neighborhoods with higher diversity and a greater presence of foreign-born, noncitizens are the most rent-burdened; so are the tracts with well-off whites and Asians. Newly built neighborhoods associate negatively with the severely burdened category and median gross rent as a percentage of income, thus highlighting the significance of newer-built housing in mitigating rent burden.

Analysing the effectiveness of demand-side rental subsidies: the case of Australia’s Commonwealth Rent Assistance scheme

Proponents of demand-side rental subsidy programmes have argued that they enhance consumer choice while costing less than supply-side interventions. However, unanswered questions remain on the effectiveness of demand-side rental subsidies in reducing affordability stress among low-income renters. This paper analyses Australia’s Commonwealth Rent Assistance (CRA) as a case study for evaluating the effectiveness of housing allowance interventions. Our evaluation exemplifies some important policy principles. First, we demonstrate that a multi-pronged package can simultaneously improve adequacy and targeting on those in greatest housing stress, while maintaining revenue neutrality. Second, whether CRA is designed as an income-oriented or housing-oriented subsidy can affect its effectiveness in improving rental affordability. Third, country-specific institutional contexts cannot be ignored. In Australia, constitutional amendments may be required if CRA is to be paid as a stand-alone housing payment rather than as a supplement to other social security payments. Furthermore, given the role of CRA in the esoteric funding structure of social housing, reforms to payment structure must incorporate meaningful measures to avoid unintended damaging consequences in this arena. Finally, any implementation of reforms should be embedded within a strong housing logic that aims to reduce affordability stress rather than as part of a fiscal cost reduction exercise.

Affordability of residential house rent market value in Hawassa city

The urban housing situation in Ethiopia is a wide gap between housing demand and actual supply in all urban centers of the country. Generally, the study aims to examine the affordability of residential house rent market value. Specifically, the study aims to assess the characteristics of rental housing, examined rent affordability; identify factors that determined rental affordability in Hawassa city, Sidama Regional State, Ethiopia. The study employed both primary and secondary data. Primary data were obtained from 219 rental households through questioners. For data analysis, the study employed both descriptive and inferential statistics. Logistics regression estimation technique was used to examine the affordability of residential house rent market value. About 68.04% of surveyed households were paid 30% or less of their monthly income to residential house rent, and 31.96% of a household were spent more than the thresholds’ income level. The findings of the study revealed that household income, marital status, number of rooms, transport access and house typology are the determinants of residential house rent market value affordability in Hawassa city, Sidama region, Ethiopia. The study suggests that government should be focused on constructing public houses, controlling the effects of illegal brokers and subsidizes private house builders through credit access, tax break down for imported construction materials and provision of land with low lease.

Rental Affordability, Coping Strategies, and Impacts in Diverse Immigrant Communities

Rental affordability represents a growing issue across the United States. Existing research largely focuses on consumption trade-offs related to rising rents or the impacts of poverty more generally. Much remains unknown about how rental affordability shapes household, family, and community-level dynamics, including differences in impacts and coping strategies across groups. We use data from focus groups with low-income immigrant and refugee households to reveal deep and far-reaching impacts. We show how residents rely upon unique neighborhood-based resources and social support. Citing significant competition for affordable units and their desire to stay in the neighborhood, residents express that they have limited alternatives to their current housing—even as many described harmful housing conditions and housing-related stress. Furthermore, rising housing costs have strained community and family dynamics, undermining social support. These findings illustrate unique and impactful housing affordability dynamics among diverse populations, which extend far beyond household and housing consumption, force impactful trade-offs, and introduce constraints.

The Incongruence between Objective and Subjective Rental Affordability: Does Residential Satisfaction Matter?

The Incongruence between Objective and Subjective Rental Affordability: Does Residential Satisfaction Matter?

Reluctant regulators? Rent regulation in Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic

Rents in the Australian private rental sector (PRS) have long been determined by the market, but during the public health and economic crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, state and territory governments implemented emergency measures to prevent evictions and regulate rents. This article reviews the rent measures implemented and their outcomes, using survey data and other quantitative evidence, and interviews with PRS stakeholders. We find the rent measures, which relied on negotiations between individual landlords and tenants, had a modest effect – just 8–16% of tenants got a rent variation – and tenants, landlords and agents struggled in unfamiliar roles. The emergency period holds lessons and prompts questions about future directions in policy-making for rental affordability and PRS relations.

Characteristics Associated With Unsheltered Status Among Veterans

Unsheltered homelessness is a strongly debated public issue. The study objective is to identify personal and community characteristics associated with unsheltered homelessness in veterans and to test for interactions between these characteristics. In a 2018 national survey of U.S. veterans with homeless experiences; investigators assessed unsheltered time; psychosocial characteristics; and community measures of shelter access, weather, and rental affordability. Associations between these characteristics and unsheltered status were tested in July-August 2020. This study also tested whether the count of personal risk factors interacted with community characteristics in predicting unsheltered status. Among 5,406 veterans, 481 (8.9%) reported ≥7 nights unsheltered over 6 months. This group was more likely to report criminal justice history, poor social support, medical and drug problems, financial hardship, and being unmarried. Their communities had poorer shelter access and warmer temperatures. The likelihood of unsheltered experience rose with risk factor count from 2.0% (0-1) to 8.4% (2-3) and to 24.2% (4-11). Interaction tests showed that the increase was greater for communities with warmer weather and higher rents (p<0.05). Among veterans experiencing homelessness, unsheltered experiences correlate with individual and community risk factors. Communities wishing to address unsheltered homelessness will need to consider action at both levels.

Challenging the Discourse around the Impacts of Airbnb through Suburbs Not Cities: Lessons from Australia and COVID-19

Supporters of short-term rental (STR) platforms state that STRs represent a small fraction of the housing market of major cities and therefore have little impact on rents. However, there is emerging evidence that suggests that STRs have highly localised impacts. In this article, we use the natural experiment of the pause in tourism caused by the COVID-19 pandemic to highlight the impact of a decrease in STR listings on rental markets in the case study city of Hobart, Australia. We find that rental affordability has improved in Hobart’s STR-dense suburbs with the increased vacancies from the underutilised STR properties. These results provide evidence of the impact of STRs on local housing markets when analysed on a finer scale than the whole-of-city approach. The focus on local housing markets helps local communities and city governments build an argument for the impact of STRs on tight housing markets.

Affordable Rental Housing: Making It Part of Europe’s Recovery

Many European economies have faced pressure from rental housing affordability that has widened social and economic divergence. While significant country and regional differences exist, this departmental paper finds that in many advanced European economies a large and rising share of low-income renters, the young, and those living in cities is overburdened. In several locations, middle-income groups also increasingly face rental affordability issues.

Rental tenure and rent burden: progress in interdisciplinary scholarship and pathways for geographical research.

Rental housing accommodates more than a billion tenants worldwide, and in recent years, rentership has been increasing in some countries. Given reduced access to homeownership in various locations due to several causes, it is critical to focus on rentership which has received relatively less attention compared to homeownership, especially within the geography scholarship. In this review article, we identify four key themes that have naturally emerged from the close examination of recent interdisciplinary literature on rentership and rental affordability. These include: (1) rental housing financialization; (2) the proliferation of single-family rentals resulting from the U.S. foreclosure crisis; (3) the determinants and consequences of rent burden; and (4) the relationship between rent burden and regional economic specialization. We discuss these themes and propose potential opportunities for the geographic analysis of rent burden, its determinants, and their relationships with regional economic specialization. We posit that the four identified themes have been developing in apparent isolation, thus making scholarship less consistent. Moreover, research on rent burden is disjointed in itself, which makes it difficult to establish a unified narrative and interlinked subthemes within the rent burden literature. Nonetheless, we contextualize the four themes in their application to geography and frame our discussion around the central notion of this article—rent burden.

Combined Rental and Transportation Affordability under China’s Public Rental Housing System—A Case Study of Nanjing

As a core element of China’s housing security system, public rental housing (PRH) has gradually become an effective means of providing low- and moderately low-income groups with viable housing options and is regarded as the embodiment of housing justice values under the Chinese socialist system. Affordability for the groups covered by this system is crucial to its sustainable positive role. By modifying the housing and transportation affordability index (H&amp;TAI) equation proposed by the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) and Center for Transit-Oriented Development (CTOD), United States, this paper establishes a novel rental and transportation affordability index (R&amp;TAI), introduces transportation-time-cost and comprehensive-transportation-cost concepts and obtains transportation-time-cost data through accessibility analysis, which are incorporated into calculations of comprehensive transportation cost with the ArcGIS spatial analysis software. Based on the ratio of the combined cost of rental housing and transportation to household residual income (RI), this paper studies and measures the combined affordability for low- and moderately low-income residents under the PRH system. The burden of high combined rental and transportation costs not only greatly reduces residents’ ability to cope but also limits sustainable PRH system development, exacerbating the gaps between social strata. This study and its conclusions provide a reference for the Chinese government for reforming the macro-housing system and practically regulating the housing market while providing residents with options to reduce their comprehensive burden and improve their quality of life.

Informality, the marginalised and regulatory inadequacies: a case study of tenants’ experiences of shared room housing in Sydney, Australia

Shared housing emerges as an important housing choice for low-to-middle income tenants experiencing difficulties accessing housing in competitive and unaffordable formal rental markets. Shared room housing – where two or more non-related tenants share sleeping spaces, such as bedrooms or partitioned living rooms – is a growing subcategory of shared housing in cities of the Global North. Shared room tenancies are arranged under multi-layered sub-letting rental arrangements that often lack written tenancy agreements and formal protection. Despite evidence that more people are living in shared room housing, there is limited research that explores the experiences of those living in these informal arrangements and the relationship with policy/regulatory frameworks that seek to govern shared housing practices. This paper addresses this gap by investigating tenants’ motivations for living, and the challenges they face, in informal shared room housing in Sydney. The study finds that shared room housing offers flexibility and rental affordability for tenants marginalised from the formal rental market; however, it also raises a series of issues, such as tenure insecurity, exploitation, health and safety risks, and lack of access to formal dispute resolution services. The paper identifies regulatory and enforcement challenges in informal shared room housing and calls for policy reforms.

Rental Affordability in the Wake of Natural Disasters

Rental Affordability in the Wake of Natural Disasters

An Evaluation of Rental Housing Affordability by Staff of Tertiary Institutions in Owerri, Imo State, Nigeria

There has been a serious threat to rental accommodation in the urban areas especially to certain grade of workers in the tertiary institutions, whose income in most cases are based on their salaries. The ever increasing cost of rental accommodation has nevertheless forced this group of workers to spend greater part of their income in search of adequate accommodation. The paper is an evaluation of adequate rental housing affordability by workers in relation to their income levels and other household needs, using the staff of tertiary institutions in Owerri, Imo State of Nigeria. The research also tried to find out the variables that affect the choice of rents and thus rate them according to their level of significance. Data were drawn from 01-09 salary grade levels comprising of both academic and non-academic staff of the five tertiary institutions in Owerri. 250 samples were selected using stratified random sampling techniques, same number of questionnaires was distributed, and 210 of the questionnaires were returned. Out of that, 191 questionnaires were considered valid, while the remaining was invalid. Tables and Percentages were used to analyze most of the data, while Statistical Program for Social Sciences (SPSS) software package was used to run a multiple regression. In the analysis, actual rent was the dependent variable while income, family size and other household expenditure were the independent variables. As a result the following estimated equation was developed Y (Affordable rent) = 75.527 + (0.05037 income) + (8.578 family size) + (0.01254 other household expenditure). The study revealed that three variables constitute 41% of the total variables that influence adequate rental affordability. The result of combined variables shows that fcal = 43.377 as against ftab of 1.20 which explains that the three variable are important as determinants. The result of tcal (testing the significance of the individual variables) reveals that income ranks the highest determinant; family size becomes the next while other expenditures were not so significant. The paper recommended an introduction of staff housing scheme especially for the lower income group, to alleviate the cost of housing and transportation.

Explaining the Increase in Young Adults Living with Parents

:In recent years, a rising proportion of young adults living with their parents has garnered national attention. Even young adults between the ages of twenty-five to thirty-four have not been immune to this trend. This article explores the causes behind the rising parental co-residence over the past thirty-five years using macro data. The article shows that rents have far outstripped incomes for young adults and that increasing unaffordability of renting is a significant factor behind the rising proportion of young adults living with their parents. Although declining interest rates have mitigated rising home prices thereby increasing home affordability, they have not impacted rental affordability.

Examining Rental Housing Affordability Among Eastern Ethiopian Cities

The rental sector had been neglected in government housing policy and in the local government's resource allocation, though it apprehended a large number of urban dwellers and which will undoubtedly continue in the future. The study aimed to examine the rental housing affordability, assess rental housing characteristics, identify factors which determined rental affordability and devised alternatives to promote rental housing affordability. About 651 questionnaires were distributed to rental households and government officials were interviewed to capture experience on rental regulatory and administrative issues. Global and local experiences on government housing policy and strategies revealed that the rental housing was less emphasized or sometimes, it was totally ignored. However, results from inter-census survey report revealed that the rental sectors had contributed much in addressing the residential needs of the urban poor and the contribution of the sector in addressing the housing needs were raised from 45 percent to 54 percent. Results from the logistic regression analysis indicated us the rental levels in the sample cities were in the threshold at least for 60 percent of the households. However, this event does not mean that rent is affordable; rather the lessee had a compromised adequacy of housing with monthly rental price to be in acceptable range. Therefore, the government should devise alternatives to promote rental sectors through regulation and policy interventions. Among the possible measures, getting rental housing on the larger urban policy is the first and central intervention. The government should regulate the rental market through regulatory and policy measures by making balance the interests of both landlords and renters. Keywords : need for rental housing, rent affordability, housing condition, measures of affordability DOI : 10.7176/DCS/9-6-01 Publication date :June 30 th 2019

Social sustainability of urban regeneration led by industrial land redevelopment in Taiwan

ABSTRACTAbandoned industrial sites, usually contaminated by hazardous substances, create social injustice in the surrounding communities. Redevelopment of industrial land has brought prospects of sustainable development to the communities that live in and around them. This research is to identify the critical factors facilitating urban regeneration and particularly social sustainability in Kaohsiung, an industrial city of Taiwan which experienced deindustrialization in recent decades, resulting in several abandoned industrial sites and decay of the adjacent urban communities. Two different industrial land redevelopment projects were examined; (1) Jhongdou Wetland Park, which focuses on environmental sustainability, and (2) Pier-2 Art Centre, which focuses on economic sustainability. Measured by the social sustainability indicators developed by the Oxford Institute for Sustainable Development and through findings from a questionnaire survey of community members, this study found that the redevelopment project of the Pier-2 Art Centre has a higher level of social sustainability than the Jhongdou Wetland Park, performing better in six out of nine themes. Critical dimensions resulting in the better performance in social sustainability of the Pier-2 Art Centre included rental affordability, heritage conservation, community image, cultural activity, community association, public space, local organization and higher accessibility to facility.

Lobbying for rent regulation in Hong Kong: Rental market politics and framing strategies

Growing demand for private renting has stimulated debates on rent regulation in many cities. In Hong Kong, grassroots groups have lobbied for stronger rent regulation, in the context of rapidly rising rents. This paper seeks to interpret the evolving dynamics of the rent regulation debate in Hong Kong, from the 1990s to the present. In particular, the paper seeks to interpret changes in the lobbying strategies of advocacy groups, through applying theories from the sociological literature on framing processes. The findings reveal that advocates and opponents disagree because of divergent prognostic frames, despite their similar diagnosis of rental affordability problems. Furthermore, existing motivational frames are unable to mobilise support from a broader range of households. These insights are relevant not only to debates on housing policy, but also to other public policy areas, where the degree of resonance of motivational frames helps explain the change in momentum of policy advocacy work.