Housing Affordability in a Global Perspective

This paper discusses housing affordability in cities the world over based on data from the Land and Housing Survey in a Global Sample of Cities. We report on the composition of the housing sector across a 200-city sample and develop two measures of housing affordability: occupant affordability – a sector-wide measure of the relative housing affordability for the typical household that occupies a specific dwelling, whether in the formal, informal, private or public housing sectors, and median affordability – a measure of the ability of the median income household in a given city to acquire a typical unit in the formal private housing sector. We also develop an OLS model that explains the variation in housing affordability and shows the effects of population size, urban extent density, land supply regulatory restrictions, and the presence of informal and public housing, on the overall city housing affordability.