Housing Affordability and Segmentation in Urban Europe in the 21st Century

The ‘dramatic’ decline of housing affordability has been noted in many global and ordinary cities around the world in the past decades. And it is clear that house prices and household expenditures on housing have escalated faster than household incomes. The situation aggravated in the late 2000s in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), and there are voices arguing that the COVID19 pandemic has even further increased the importance of the housing affordability issue. This presentation illustrates trends and variations in housing affordability, understood here as the housing expenditure-to-income ratio, and housing segmentation (housing ownership) in Athens, Berlin, Budapest, Helsinki, London, Madrid, Paris, Vienn, Warsaw, and Zurich in 2006-2022. This study relies on the micro-data from several rounds of the EU-SILC survey; for Warsaw, we used the results of the Household Budget Survey. In addition to a descriptive analysis portraying changes in housing affordability and segmentation in the ten selected cities in the first two decades of the 21st century, we also offer the results of regression models which illustrate the demographic, economic, and social disparities in housing burden and ownership patterns. Whereas the differences across cases in the share of owner-occupied housing are sensitive to the institutional/national context, the declining rate of homeownership has been a consistent trend since the mid-2000s. Even if it is hard to weave a universal narrative on the relationship between characteristics of households and differences in housing affordability, it seems that homeowners and higher income households enjoy a relatively low housing burden.