Housing Affordability for Urban Regions

Abstract

Urban regions are recognised as driving forces of the global economy as well as the main sources of social inequality. In recent decades, particularly, housing access has become a serious problem, not only for the most disadvantaged population, but also for the middle class, as a result of economic crises and despite of prices decline in the housing market. In urban regions with high population density, some social groups face problems of housing affordability that depend not only on market prices but also on income availability. The contribution proposes a methodology for income-threshold assessment through a combination between the ratio income and the residual income approaches, which is applied to two different Sicilian urban regions: the urban region of Palermo (UR PA) and the urban region of Syracuse and Ragusa (UR SR-RG). A focus on low-income levels in high residential tension municipalities helps to highlight the distribution of the housing access problem. The analysis can provide a cognitive support for developing strategies and planning tools or for implementing actions that are oriented to address the housing issue.