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The share of income that households spent on their housing has been increasing over time in a wide range of countries, particularly among lower income households. In theory, the share of income spent on housing can reflect variations in household preferences for housing consumption but for low-income household, high burdens are likely more reflective of constraints and force these households to face tradeoffs between housing and non-housing consumption that negatively affect their overall life satisfaction. This paper uses data from the 2018 European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) for 14 countries. We find that, controlling for household sociodemographic characteristics, households spending more than 30 percent of their income and those spending more than 50 percent of their income on housing report significantly lower levels of life satisfaction. The estimated relationship is largest for this latter heavily cost burdened group. The negative relationship between housing cost burden and reported life satisfaction is found across countries but varies in magnitude, suggesting that stronger welfare systems may mediate the negative impacts of housing cost burdens, although further research is needed to confirm both this relationship and the precise mechanisms driving it.

Existing research on housing cost burden focuses on its evolution over time. Few empirical studies, meanwhile, investigate changes in housing cost burden as a function of age. Literature is also scarce on how people’s housing cost burden is affected by the act of retiring. In order to fill this research gap, we examine how the burden of housing costs tends to change after retirement and how the impact of retirement on housing cost burden differs for tenants as compared to homeowners. Taking advantage of the longitudinal data provided by the German Socio-Economic Panel (1993–2019), we estimate fixed effects regressions and model impact functions to estimate how people’s housing cost burdens change after they retire. In addition, we interact the retirement event with tenure status. Our results show that retirement is associated with an increase in housing cost burden and that this association is stronger among tenants than among homeowners. We contribute to the literature on housing cost burden by taking a longitudinal perspective and showing that critical life events such as retirement do have an impact on the financial pressures exerted on households by housing costs and can even exacerbate the existing inequality in terms of housing cost burden between tenants and homeowners. We also demonstrate the importance for policy makers and future research of identifying social groups that may be particularly prone to financial overburden as a result of elevated housing costs in old age in order to implement policies that avoid such overburden and prevent the increase in social inequality after retirement.

Housing is an important dimension of social inequality between couples, but it has been largely ignored in prior research on union dissolution. Extending the literature that controlled for the stabilizing effect of homeownership, we investigate whether housing, measured as household density, housing tenure and housing affordability, is related to the risk of union dissolution. Based on data from the German Family Panel (pairfam), we analyze 3441 coresidential partnerships. We run discrete-time event-history models to assess the risk of separation within a time frame of 7 years. Housing affordability is found to be negatively related to the risk of union dissolution among couples, as those couples with a high residual income (i.e., household income after deducting housing costs) were less likely to separate than those with a lower residual income. By contrast, household density is found to be unrelated to separation. In line with previous research, our findings indicate that homeowners had more stable relationships than tenants. The analysis shows that this was the case regardless of whether the home was jointly owned or was owned by one partner only.

In this essay, we review the basic economics of housing supply and the functioning of US housing markets to better understand the distribution of home prices, household wealth, and the spatial distribution of people across markets. We employ a cost-based approach to gauge whether a housing market is delivering appropriately priced units. Specifically, we investigate whether market prices (roughly) equal the costs of producing the housing unit. If so, the market is well-functioning in the sense that it efficiently delivers housing units at their production cost. The gap between price and production cost can be understood as a regulatory tax. The available evidence suggests, but does not definitively prove, that the implicit tax on development created by housing regulations is higher in many areas than any reasonable negative externalities associated with new construction. We discuss two main effects of developments in housing prices: on patterns of household wealth and on the incentives for relocation to high-wage, high-productivity areas. Finally, we turn to policy implications.

The primary goal of this study is to contribute on the literature on poverty by looking at household economic hardship in relation to the housing cost burden. Being one of the most significant outlays in a household balance, housing costs may indeed cause households to reduce non-housing expenditure such as health care, education, food, and clothing, thus creating serious household economic hardship. Using microdata from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions dataset (EU-SILC) regarding five European countries (Italy, Germany, UK, Spain, and France) we have examined the predictive power of housing costs in explaining family economic hardship. Furthermore, we have jointly estimated the effect of the housing cost burden upon economic hardship for renters versus home-owners paying mortgages. Results showed that housing costs represent a non negligible burden in all the five European countries. Moreover, home ownership was found to significantly reduce household hardship status.

Is income inequality a driver of homelessness at the community level? We theorize that inequality affects homelessness both by crowding out low-income households from the rental market (what we call an “income channel”) and by causing home prices to rise (a “price channel”). We construct a dataset of information on inequality, homelessness, rent burden, and housing prices in 239 communities from 2007 to 2018 and use it to assess the income inequality–homelessness relationship. Our results suggest that income inequality is a significant driver of community homelessness and that the “income channel” is the more likely mechanism through which homelessness is created. We argue that broader policy efforts to reduce income inequality are likely to have the collateral effect of reducing homelessness, and we discuss the need for national and local policies to help low-income households afford housing.

A majority of German households are occupied by renters. There are indications of growing inequality through disproportional income increases among high-income households and disproportional rent increases among low-income households. On the basis of the German Socio-Economic Panel, the author examines rent-income ratios (RIRs) and differentiates between migrants and natives. How did RIRs develop between 1990 and 2020, and are there any differences across the distribution? There are three key findings. First, dynamics of RIRs suggest rising economic inequality among both migrants and natives. Second, although both groups grew more unequal over time, the inequality increase was stronger among migrants. Third, migrants generally faced steeper rent hikes than natives, which partly accounts for a higher rent burden among income-poor migrants. These descriptive findings point out avenues for systematic research of the increases in inequality related to rent and income dynamics and their ethnoracial stratification.

Changes in housing-supply regulations may be the most important transformation that has happened in the American housing market since the development of the automobile, but this change is both under-studied and under-debated. The positive research agenda going forward should be to understand why these changes have occurred and how they relate to other major trends in American society. The normative policy agenda should be to better understand the costs and benefits of limits on new construction. The costs appear to include higher prices and a misallocation of labor, while the benefits include internalization of construction-related externalities. Given the magnitude of this regulatory shift, the economics profession could make a major contribution by analyzing the welfare effects of regulation on the rise in housing prices.

The purpose of this article is to report on a study that investigated the current low-cost housing conditions, the residents' subjective well-being and examine how residents' preferences can be used to improve the subjective well-being of the residents in Jigawa State, Nigeria. This article is a product of a quantitative research whereby descriptive analysis was employed. The results showed that, almost all the low-cost housing estates in the state are in poor conditions characterised by poor structural design, insufficient facilities and supporting services. The findings reveal that, about 73.4% of the resident exhibit a low level of subjective well-being with a mean score of (M=3.54). Through Relative Important Index, the study found out that residents preferred more number of bedrooms, toilets, access to services and remain safe from accidents than any other attributes of housing units. In conclusion, this article reveals that the subjective well-being of the residents can be improved if what residents preferred is considered in the development of the low-cost housing estates for both present and in the future. Thus, the article would serve housing developers and housing policymakers to understand that the housing constructions and infrastructural elements should be considered in relation to the preferences of the beneficiaries.

Krase and DeSena offer a comprehensive view from the street of two iconic Brooklyn neighborhoods, Crown Heights-Prospect-Lefferts Gardens and Greenpoint-Williamsburg. They analyze the neighborhoods' precipitous decline and subsequent spectacular rise.