Housing Expenditures
Housing affordability can be measured by the changing relationships between house prices and rents, and between house prices and incomes. There has been an increase among policy makers in affordable housing as the price of housing has increased dramatically creating a crisis in affordable housing.
Since 2000 the "world experienced an unprecedented house price boom in terms of magnitude and duration, but also of synchronisation across countries." "Never before had house prices risen so fast, for so long, in so many countries." Prices doubled in many countries and nearly tripled in Ireland.
The bursting of the biggest financial bubble in history in 2008 wreaked havoc globally on the housing market. By 2011 home prices in Ireland had plunged by 45% from their peak in 2007. In the United States prices fell by 34% while foreclosures increased exponentially. In Spain and Denmark home prices dropped by 15%. However, in spite of the bust, home prices continue to be overvalued by about 25% or more in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, New Zealand, Britain, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden.
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Famous quotes containing the word housing:
“We have been weakened in our resistance to the professional anti-Communists because we know in our hearts that our so-called democracy has excluded millions of citizens from a normal life and the normal American privileges of health, housing and education.”
—Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)