Housing Affordability Index: Real Estate Market and Housing Situations

Abstract

One of the main problems in defining strategies for the real estate market (whether in terms of planning and, therefore, in public administration, or whether of a considerably more speculative nature, and therefore, in the private sector) lies in the operator’s less than perfect knowledge of the aspects of supply and demand, due to the real estate market’s characteristics. The prerequisite to starting or sustaining virtuous dynamics in territorial development is knowledge of the real estate market, an area that has now been widely studied, in terms of the potential for economic, social and territorial development. This paper proposes the application of a synthetic index, the Housing Affordability Index (HAI), which was developed in detail at the municipality level to identify areas where housing is inadequate. The territorial scope includes Northwest regions of Italy, Liguria and Lombardy. HAI describes what happened and must then be understood conducing multi-disciplinary examinations, intended to explain why it happened.