P ublic concern over the affordability of housing arises from two factors. First, housing is the single largest expenditure item in the budgets of most families and individuals. The average household devotes roughly onequarter of income to housing expenditures, while poor and near-poor households commonly devote half of their incomes to housing. These high proportions suggest that small percent...

This paper seeks to determine how demographic and non-demographic factors have contributed to past changes in Canada’s real housing prices as well as their possible impact over the next twenty years. To this goal, we estimate with annual data from 1956 to1997 a structural model of the Canadian housing market. This model possesses two important long-run properties, that is, the longrun supply cu...

In this paper, aimed as a background for further research, the author examines the effect of urbanisation on housing for the low income earners in Kampala. The author discusses Kampala’s housing environment by looking at low-income earners’ access to housing in the city under conditions of rapid population rise, growing housing demand, rising land prices and growing poverty. Findings show that ...

Housing, food, and water are considered to be basic requirements for daily living. Unfortunately, inadequate housing with poor water supply, sanitation, and ventilation threatens the lives and health of some 600 million urban dwellers worldwide (see, among others, Cebu Study Team 1991; S. A. Esrey et al. 1991; Galiani, Gertler, and Ernesto Schargrodsky 2005; and World Bank 2005). For this reaso...

China’s decade-long housing boom looks nothing short of a gigantic bubble familiar to many countries: In big cities the price-to-income ratio reached 30 to 1 and the vacancy rate stood at 30% or above. This paper provides a theoretical framework to shed light on the causes and consequences of the great housing boom in China. We argue that the boom could be a rational bubble rooted in China’s un...

This paper concerns the ontology and epistemology of comparative research, which are the foundations of a research strategy. It builds upon a Realist ontology (Bhaskar, 1975, 1979; Sayer, 1984,1985, 2000; Lawson, 1997, 1999) of necessary and contingent relations forming causal mechanisms, in order to extend existing frameworks for explaining difference and change in housing networks. Housing ne...

This paper examines a welfare issue of growing importance in many least developed countries, that of determinants of housing quality and uses the case of Ghana to add to the body of empirical knowledge. The paper presents estimates of the determinants of housing quality in Ghana using the Core Welfare Instrument. The empirical analysis based on the Logistic and Ordinary Least Square regressions...