New and innovative concepts for realizing middle segment rental housing

The Netherlands is dealing with a severe housing crisis, in which there is a major shortage of affordable housing. The government has introduced many new regulations, trying to curb this affordability problem. Many of these measures seem to center around tempering market parties on the Dutch housing market. However, quite contradictory is that...

First-time buyers on the Dutch housing market: An analysis of their (changing) position

Ensuring good living accomodation is a constitutional duty of the government, but there is now a shortage of 300,000 homes. Demand for housing has grown sharply in recent years. In the last two years, the housing market issue has been high on the political agenda again. In it, the issue of starters regarding home ownership occupies a prominent...

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...

Modular Habitat: Affordable, Circular, Lively

The goal of this project is to design a high-quality circular housing complex. The challenge lies in finding a balance between creating a circular and high-quality result and making it as cost-effective as possible. Circularity in this design will focus on using prefabricated timber modules that are designed for disassembly. It also entails the...

More with Less: Towards an affordable Munich

This paper discusses relevant defini-tions of affordable housing in order to aim for a common understanding of the topic. This common understanding consists of two dimensions – the rea-sonable economic burden and housing quality. Both dimensions can be exam-ined from a qualitative and quantitative perspective. A qualitative perspective consists...

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...