Urban Housing Affordability Research Articles

Informality, affordability, and mortgage stress during the COVID-19 pandemic: A mixed-methods study of urban low-income households in Mumbai’s periphery

ABSTRACT The preexisting global urban housing affordability crisis worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic. Within nations, households belonging to various socioeconomic strata differentially experienced housing affordability issues, with the low-income households disproportionately bearing the affordability stress compared to the higher-income households. We use a mixed-methods approach to investigate the consequences of COVID-19-induced mortgage stress in 154 low-income homebuyers living in the periphery of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region in India. We draw upon the Conservation of Resources theory to study the stress outcomes due to affordability issues and understand its linkages with household financial wellbeing. A quantitative survey of 154 study participants revealed a significant relationship between mortgage stress and financial well-being mediated by financial stress. Further, qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews of 16 study participants using a comparative lens suggested that the pandemic-induced affordability issues disproportionately affected households with informal employment. Overall, the findings highlight a dynamic nature of affordability and its peculiar interplay with informality, emphasizing the urgency to reorient housing policies toward affordability and informality issues.

COVID‐19 and the urban housing affordability – evidence from select Indian cities

AbstractThe COVID‐19 crisis, globally, has significantly impacted the residential real estate market. Health concerns and lockdowns have contributed to the downturn of the sector. High unsold inventory, financial crunch, and lack of stakeholders' perspective fueled the decline in housing affordability. However, with the steady bouncing back of the economy and recovery in the market between the intermittent spikes in the pandemic, there has been a path to recovery. Housing sales, which is one of the significant yardsticks to ensure a robust economic recuperation, had an upswing of nearly 60% annually across major Indian cities during January–June 2022, as reported by Knight Frank's India Real Estate Report. Housing in India had been unaffordable even in the pre‐pandemic period, but due to several government interventions during the pandemic, the housing sector was able to recover its lost ground.This paper aims at understanding the affordability of housing in seven major metropolitan cities across India. This is discerned through the analysis of the housing price data published by NHB‐RESIDEX and the price‐to‐gross domestic product (GDP) ratios for the cities. It also examines the work from home (WFH) phenomenon and looks at the incentives and programmes from the government during the pandemic on housing in large cities in India.

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.

Urban Housing Affordability Problem in Africa: A Search for Pragmatic Solution?

The paper takes a holistic view of the housing affordability problem to discuss the multifaceted nature of the problem vis-à-vis the political, social, institutional, economic, and financial milieu of Africa. The paper reviews the definitions of housing and housing affordability, and analyses relevant secondary data obtained through archival research and google search to propose practical measures for resolving the problem in the context of the socio-economic, cultural, and political milieu of Africa. It concludes that the enormity of the problem is a function of the vested interest of the powerbrokers, the market, the unwitting application of western models to Africa, poverty, and the sheer neglect of time-tested African means of affordable housing delivery by the housing policymakers of Africa. A significant fascinating finding is that the people can build cheap houses that no one (including the government, international bodies, aid donors, and especially the market) can do for them. All they need is help with infrastructure provision.

Urban housing affordability, economic disadvantage and racial disparities in gun violence: A neighbourhood analysis in four US cities

Abstract This study seeks to examine how urban affordability, and related issues of eviction and joblessness, are associated with gun violence in the United States. After discussing the theoretical importance of studying housing affordability, we provide a preliminary examination of how urban affordability moderates the relationship between other markers of economic disadvantage and gun violence. This study further considers whether these different indicators of disadvantage are associated with gun violence differently by majority Black and majority White neighbourhoods. This study rests on neighbourhood-level data from 4 large US cities. Through a series of fixed-effects models, our results reveal that changes in affordability are significantly associated with rising gun violence in general, particularly in majority Black neighbourhoods. Furthermore, joblessness and eviction are less influential in shaping gun violence in more affordable neighbourhoods, but more consequential in communities facing higher rent burdens. The study reiterates several recommendations about reducing unaffordability in urban communities, as well as recommending several avenues for future research on urban violence.

A geography of repoliticisation: Popularising alternative housing models in Oslo

The question of the political has gained renewed relevance in recent years. New movements are challenging what has been called ‘the post-political consensus’ and have facilitated the repoliticisation of a wide range of social, political and cultural phenomena—both on the left and the right. One task for geographers is to understand this repoliticisation spatially. The housing sector is a prime example of how such a repoliticisation occurs. With an emerging global urban housing affordability crisis, housing is becoming an important arena for engaging in emancipatory democratic politics. In this paper, we use Oslo as a case to analyse how housing, which has long been governed through liberal consensus, is being repoliticised. We investigate Oslo's agenda of establishing a ‘third housing sector’ beyond the privatised model, and its role in popularising alternative models in housing. We focus on the mobilisation and rearticulation of the genealogy of failure of housing in Oslo and the alternative housing solutions brought together in the city. Discussing the emerging geographical referencescape of housing as a distinctly spatial process of politicisation we show how arguments and positions gain legitimacy by situating references to other situations and places in a multiplicity of local and foreign arenas.

Grounding Urban Governance on Housing Affordability: A Conceptual Framework for Policy Analysis. Insights from Vienna

Growing and attractive cities, such as Vienna, globally face housing crises. Urban land rent (inflated by the huge housing demand in attractive areas and the consequent housing shortage) is transferred to housing prices and results in increasingly unaffordable and inaccessible cities. Housing affordability is a critical factor for enjoying the use value of housing and the broader set of values associated with cities. To assure urban agglomerations' inclusiveness and spatial justice, urban governance should be grounded on affordability by redistributing land rent and keeping housing prices hooked on income levels. However, the relation between urban land rent and housing affordability is rarely connected in Housing studies. Furthermore, it is often neglected by urban governors, generally competing to increase housing prices and attract investments. This article contributes to fill this policy/research gap and offers new conceptual avenues for the analysis of urban housing affordability governance. A theoretical basis and a coherent analytical framework for policy analysis are empirically applied in a case study of the city of Vienna, focusing on affordable rental housing. Based on peculiarities—of history, political stability, and a solid welfare system—the Viennese case offers relevant insights for disentangling the complex network of policies and institutions that ground urban growth on affordability.

Spectre of neoliberal gentrification in Fiji: the price Suva's poor must pay

This article seeks to examine Fiji's current housing crisis against the backdrop of neoliberal urbanism. In doing so, the article offers a fresh new perspective on the marginalisation, displacement and outright exclusion of the urban poor from the inner city areas of Suva. Among the trademark growth problems experienced by neoliberal cities across the globe, the crisis of urban housing affordability is perhaps more pronounced in Suva given economies of scale and constraints in Fiji's land tenure system. This article seeks to highlight that Suva's inner city spaces are being transformed along the lines of market fundamentalism and that this will exacerbate the social exclusion and displacement of Suva's poor.

A fresh look at contemporary perspectives on urban housing affordability

ABSTRACT The literature on housing affordability has grown rapidly since Hulchanski [1995, p. 489. The concept of housing affordability: six contemporary uses of the housing expenditure-to-income ratio. Housing Studies, 10(4), 471–491] declared that housing researchers should avoid using the term since it is not a robust concept and measurement often lacks validity. In the ensuing 24 years, however, scholars have continued to debate the definition and measurement of housing affordability as well as the prevalence and type of ‘housing affordability problems’ in various countries. This paper is a think piece which takes a fresh look at housing affordability as a concept which has persisted despite considerable contestation and scepticism about its use. It provides a critical and multi-disciplinary assessment of housing affordability starting with early conceptualization of the nexus between economic principles and social norms about housing and living standards to a reworking of housing affordability in the twenty-first century as an urban issue affecting lower and middle-income households in cities, as a consequence of the financialization of housing and urban restructuring. It argues that the housing affordability concept has been repurposed such that the focus is less on understanding housing expenditures in contributing to poverty and disadvantage within the domain of social policy and more on the urban policy challenges of growing inequities in access to urban resources. The paper highlights the challenges for urban policy in adopting and adapting rather than rejecting a multi-dimensional concept of housing affordability and consequently the importance of new ways of measuring urban housing affordability.

The Impact of Airbnb on Residential Property Values and Rents: Evidence from Portugal

Short-term rentals have facilitated the upraise trend in tourism growth in several cities around the world. However, concerns for the negative effects that such home-sharing platforms may have on the housing market and traditional markets have driven community groups and housing advocates to intensely react against them. Whether or not short-term rentals increase housing prices and rents for local residents is an empirical question. We quantify the causal effects of Airbnb's short-term rentals on urban housing affordability in Portugal by estimating quarterly housing rents and prices as a function of Airbnb concentration. We take advantage of the 2014 regulatory reform and employ a difference-in-differences (DiD) empirical strategy. We estimate an overall increase in property values of 34% and 10.9% for rents due to the short-term lease regulatory reform. We also find that these effects are particularly localized to the historical centers and areas attractive to tourists in the cities of Lisbon and Porto. A better understanding of the effects of short-term home rentals on housing markets and of the magnitude of its impact on residential property prices and rents are crucial information to determine whether it needs to be regulated and how proper regulation should be designed.

The global urban housing affordability crisis

This critical commentary confronts and explores the – so far under-recognised and under-researched – emergent global crisis of urban housing affordability and affordable housing provision. This crisis results from the fact that housing-related household expenses are rising faster than salary and wage increases in many urban centres around the world; a situation triggered by at least three global post-Global Financial Crisis megatrends of accelerated (re)urbanisation of capital and people, the provision of cheap credit and the rise of intra-society inequality. Reflecting on the recent findings of extensive comparative ethnographic research across Western countries, and analytically approaching housing affordability and affordable housing issues from a broadly understood intersection of political and economic spheres (e.g. issues of state and market, governance and regulation, policy and investment), the paper pursues four key objectives: raising awareness of the crisis, showing its extent and context-specificity but also the severe social as well as problematic spatial implications, linking current developments to key academic debates in housing studies and urban studies, and importantly, developing a research agenda that can help to redress the currently detectable ‘policy–outcome’ gap in policy making by asking fresh and urgent questions from empirical, theoretical and political viewpoints. This intervention ultimately calls for more dedicated and politicised knowledge production towards achieving affordable urban futures for all.