Housing a ffordability broadly refers to the cost of housing services and shelter - both for renters and owner occupiers - relative to a given individual's or household's disposable income. While there is no universal definition for this term, housing affordability is an easy concept to grasp in...

The purpose of this chapter is to survey recent research on housing markets and policy in what used to be called the “second” and “third” worlds. We adopt the labels “transition” economies to refer to countries as disparate as Russia and Vietnam, and “developing” to refer to...

Governments throughout the world intervene heavily in housing markets, and most have multiple policies to pursue multiple goals. This chapter deals with two of the largest types of housing policies in the United States, namely, low-income rental assistance and policies to promote homeownership...

Housing policies in Japan after World War II were focused on the quantitative supply of houses with a wide range of targeted groups and public rental houses. The Japan Housing Corporation (now the Urban Renaissance Agency) and the Government Housing Loan Corporation (now the Japan Housing...

This paper examines housing affordability in Ireland by looking at the distribution of housing costs across households. Using microdata from the SILC survey over the period 2005-2015, the contribution of this paper is threefold. First, the paper considers the trends in the cost of housing in...

Although the topic of housing – housing prices, housing policy, housing finance – has largely fallen by the wayside as a “hot” news item, these issues remain largely unresolved. This paper reviews the recent history of housing finance and housing policy, examines the realistic policy...

By combining fresh estimates of housing supply and prices with recent long-term projections for their fundamental drivers such as population, income and interest rates, this paper produces scenarios for residential investment and real house prices up to 2050. For half of the covered countries,...

According to the RF Federal Service for State Registration, Cadastre and Cartography (Rosreestr), the land area in the ownership of RF individuals continues to decrease. As of 1 January 2012, it amounted to 119.6 million hectares (m ha) (7% of the total land surface) vs. 121.4 m ha (7.1%) in...

This paper presents a complex, modular, 1:1 scale model of the Hungarian residential housing market. All the 4 million house‐ holds and their relevant characteristics are represented based on empirical micro‐level data coming from the Central Credit Information System, the Pension Payment...

Housing conditions in Belgium are among the best in OECD countries according to the Better Life Index, as dwellings are of high quality and large, and housing costs are average. However, the steep increase in house prices since 2003 has put market access for first-time buyers under pressure....