Housing Deprivation Unravelled: Application of the Capability Approach

The capability approach as a normative approach to wellbeing focuses on the real freedoms of people to choose the life they want to live (Sen, 1999). This approach is regarded as an alternative to the needs-based approach of paternalistic welfare states in Europe and seems to match well with the ambitions of the European Commission ‘to show a...

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...

Bridging the gap between social and market rented housing in six European countries?

The once clear demarcation of funding and roles of the social and market rental sectors seems to have become blurred in a number of European countries. Social renting is no longer provided only by non-profit organisations. The extent to which a gap can be identified between the social and market rental sectors in six countries in north-west...