Financialized Berlin: The Monetary Transformation of Housing, Architecture and Polity

A financialized real estate market is both an abstraction of global capital flows and a localized driver of gentrification. Under this premise, architectural form and urban design become a performance of contradicting value formations. Drawing on the methods of urban history, geography, architectural criticism and performative writing...

Flagships of the Dutch Welfare State in Transformation: A Transformation Framework for Balancing Sustainability and Cultural Values in Energy-Efficient Renovation of Postwar Walk-Up Apartment Buildings

Increasing energy efficiency of the housing stock is one of the largest challenges in the built environment today. In line with the international Paris-Climate-Change-Conference 2015, Dutch municipalities and housing associations have embraced the ambition to achieve carbon neutrality for their social housing stock by 2050. However, most deep...

EU-SILC: Should We Make Do with What We Have?

In this Briefing Paper the focus is on the EU-SILC and on the questions: What are the strengths and weaknesses of the pan-European data set EU-SILC, which stands for ‘European Union Statistics of Income and Living Conditions’? How useful is this database when making international housing comparisons? The examples in this paper are based on my...

Tenants at-risk-of-poverty induced by housing expenditure – exploratory analyses with EU-SILC

Combating poverty and social exclusion is a core policy issue in the European Union (EU). The Statis-tics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) database facilitates analyses of the extent of poverty and social exclusion. One of the indicators built from the database is the at-risk-of-poverty indicator. Applied to households, it indicates...

User Costs and Housing Expenses: Towards a more Comprehensive Approach to Affordability

Recently housing affordability has reached the agenda in Flanders and the Netherlands, giving a good reason to present a review of the concept of affordability and different definitions. The concept of short-term affordability, which is concerned with financial access to a dwelling and is based on cash flows, is combined with the concept of long...

The Affordability of Housing in the Netherlands: An Increasing Income Gap Between Renting and Owning?

Housing became more expensive in the Netherlands between 2002 and 2006, a trend which has been demonstrated using various measures of affordability. The expenditure-to-income ratios calculated for households confirm that the average cost of housing rose for tenants and homeowners, as well as for most income groups generally. This contribution...