ABSTRACT
In recent years ‘housing affordability’ has become a common way of summarising the nature of the housing diffi culty in many nations. This is in contrast to the ‘slum problem’, the ‘low-rent housing problem’, the ‘housing shortage’ or the ‘housing need’ defi nitions of previous decades. A household is said to have a housing affordability problem, in most formulations of the term, when it pays more than a certain percentage of its income to obtain adequate and appropriate housing.
