J. David Hulchanski

The concept of housing affordability: Six contemporary uses of the housing expenditure‐to‐income ratio

Abstract In recent years ‘housing affordability’ has become a commonly used term for summarising the nature of the housing difficulty in many nations. But what is the ‘housing affordability’ problem? This paper questions ‘affordability’ as a concept for analysing housing problems and as a definition of housing need. With a focus on the North American usage, this paper identifies six distinct ways in which the housing expenditure‐to‐income ratio is being used as an assumed measure of affordability: (1) description of household expenditures; (2) analysis of trends; (3) administration of public housing by defining eligibility criteria and subsidy levels; (4) definition of housing need for public policy purposes; (5) prediction of the ability of a household to pay the rent or the mortgage; and (6) as part of the selection criteria in the decision to rent or provide a mortgage. Each of the six uses is assessed based on the extent to which it is a valid and reliable measure of what it purports to measure.

The role of nonprofit housing in Canada and the United States: Some comparisons

Abstract When the development of large‐scale public housing projects was discontinued in the 1970s in both Canada and the United States, the policy response was very different. This article reviews the nature of the dissimilar low‐income housing policy paths, documenting the role of federal housing policy in the evolution of a significant nonprofit “third sector” in Canadas housing system; the decision of the U.S. federal government to rely on the private sector for subsidized rental supply; and, with very little help from the federal government, the ‘bottom‐up” attempt to develop a nonprofit housing sector in communities throughout the United States. In Canada, a permanent stock of good‐quality, nonprofit social housing was created along with a growing and increasingly competent community‐based housing development sector. The Canadian experience demonstrates that it takes time to build the capacity of the nonprofit sector. The U.S. experience demonstrates that there is a great deal of community‐based ta...