Where can you still afford to live? – a comparative perspective on European housing affordability

Résumé fourni par la source

This paper presents Europe-wide maps of housing affordability for both homeownership and private renting across local administrative units. Using over 22 million property listings collected through large-scale web scraping in 31 countries, combined with spatially disaggregated equivalized income data, we derive harmonized indicators of the floor area affordable on average regional incomes. A spline-based approach allows us to capture non-linear relationships between size and price when deriving the affordability indicators. The resulting maps reveal pronounced hotspots of unaffordability in capital regions, major urban centers, coastal zones, and tourism-intensive alpine areas, alongside large rural supply gaps in rental markets. The maps highlight an emerging affordability crisis, particularly when accounting for higher population density in the less affordable regions.Policy HighlightsUrban centers are suffering most from high housing unaffordability despite higher income levels compared to more rural areas. These are also the areas which most urgently require housing policy solutions.Low national income levels often correspond to widespread housing affordability challenges. Thus supporting income may be as important as moderating housing prices to achieve housing affordability.Touristic hotspots such as coastal and mountainous regions are systematically less affordable. Intervention in short-term rental and second home markets could be a promising policy option for these regions.

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