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J Hous and the Built Environ (2016) 31:695717
DOI 10.1007/s10901-016-9496-3
ORIGINAL PAPER
Petr Sunega1 Martin Lux1
Received: 10 March 2015 / Accepted: 9 January 2016 / Published online: 19 January 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016
Abstract This article seeks to evaluate indicators of overcrowding and housing affordability used by Eurostat and to propose alternatives that may better reect the specic contexts of individual EU states while preserving the possibility of valuable international comparison. The alternatives are assessed on the basis of the distance between the results produced by objective measures and the subjective evaluations of the problem reported by households, using one and the same data source: EU-SILC. The results show that alternative threshold denitions may decrease the current discrepancy between subjective perceptions and objective indicators of housing affordability and overcrowding. They also have the potential to lead to more effective targeting of public subsidies so that they are directed towards housing programmes that not only have an objective goal but also a subjectively identied legitimacy.
Keywords Housing Indicators Overcrowding Housing affordability
1 Introduction
This article seeks to make an evaluation of the indicators of housing affordability and overcrowding used by Eurostat, and to propose alternatives that might better reect the specic contexts of individual EU Member States while ensuring their objective international comparability. Our attempt to formulate more contextual methodology for calculating housing indicators is based on a comparison of the subjective perception of selected housing issues and their objective measurement. There has long been a gap between the
& Petr Sunega [email protected]
Martin Lux [email protected]
1 Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences, Jilska 1, 110 00 Prague 1, Czech Republic
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subjective perception of overcrowding and housing affordability in different EU Member States and their objective measurement by Eurostat indicators.
Overcrowding is commonly measured as the number of rooms in relation to household size. One of the most commonly cited denitions of housing affordability is the following: Affordability is concerned with securing some given standard of housing (or different standards) at a price or rent which does not impose, in the eyes of some third party (usually government),...