Journal ArticleDOI
The concept of housing affordability: Six contemporary uses of the housing expenditure‐to‐income ratio
TLDR
This paper identified six distinct ways in which the housing expenditure-to-income ratio is being used as an assumed measure of affordability: description of household expenditures; analysis of trends; administration of public housing by defining eligibility criteria and subsidy levels; definition of housing need for public policy purposes; prediction of the ability of a household to pay the rent or the mortgage; and as part of the selection criteria in the decision to rent or provide a mortgage.Abstract:
In recent years ‘housing affordability’ has become a commonly used term for summarising the nature of the housing difficulty in many nations. But what is the ‘housing affordability’ problem? This paper questions ‘affordability’ as a concept for analysing housing problems and as a definition of housing need. With a focus on the North American usage, this paper identifies six distinct ways in which the housing expenditure‐to‐income ratio is being used as an assumed measure of affordability: (1) description of household expenditures; (2) analysis of trends; (3) administration of public housing by defining eligibility criteria and subsidy levels; (4) definition of housing need for public policy purposes; (5) prediction of the ability of a household to pay the rent or the mortgage; and (6) as part of the selection criteria in the decision to rent or provide a mortgage. Each of the six uses is assessed based on the extent to which it is a valid and reliable measure of what it purports to measure.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
What is housing affordability? The case for the residual income approach
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss the potential implications of the residual income paradigm for the analysis of housing problems and needs, for housing subsidy policy, and for mortgage underwriting practice.
Journal ArticleDOI
Comparative analysis of MCDM methods for the assessment of sustainable housing affordability
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present an empirical application and comparison of six different multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) approaches for the purpose of assessing sustainable housing affordability, and evaluate the applicability of different MCDM methods for the focused decision problem.
Journal ArticleDOI
Generating Inequality: Mechanisms of Distribution in the U.S. Economy
Lee Soltow,Lester C. Thurow +1 more
TL;DR: For much of the past century, economic theory has bypassed the equality issue so thoroughly that Joan Robinson has compared the lack of a convincing theory of income distribution to the situation in the early 1930S when the discipline had no theoretical apparatus to deal with unemployment.
Journal ArticleDOI
An assessment of sustainable housing affordability using a multiple criteria decision making method
TL;DR: In this paper, the COPRAS method of multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) is applied to three residential areas as an example of how sustainable housing affordability can be assessed using a MCDM method.
References
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The practice of social research
TL;DR: This chapter discusses the construction of Inquiry, the science of inquiry, and the role of data in the design of research.
Book
Reliability and Validity Assessment
TL;DR: The paper shows how reliability is assessed by the retest method, alternative-forms procedure, split-halves approach, and internal consistency method.
Journal ArticleDOI
Statistical Theories of Discrimination in Labor Markets
Dennis J. Aigner,Glen G. Cain +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined economic discrimination in labor markets using a stochastic model and empirically plausibility and implications of the alternative models of economic discrimination; role of statistical theories in the explanation of labor market discrimination.
Book
Generating Inequality - Mechanisms of Distribution in the U.S. Economy
TL;DR: For much of the past century, economic theory has bypassed the equality issue so thoroughly that Joan Robinson has compared the lack of a convincing theory of income distribution to the situation in the early 1930S when the discipline had no theoretical apparatus to deal with unemployment.