【英文】国际住房负担能力报告2023年版（26页）

英文研究报告 2023年10月23日 08:56 管理员

The pandemic created a demand shock that led to rapid and unprecedented deterioration in housing affordability. According to Sam Khater, chief economist at the US Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) characterized “the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic” as “unusual in that it spurred housing demand because higher-income households who were able to work from home wanted more space and were willing to live farther from their offices.” However, house affordability has generally stabilized recently, though at higher levels than before the pandemic. In some markets there has been improvement.

This is the type of market behavior that is expected when a demand shock passes. Economists have found that house prices in more highly regulated housing markets tend to be more volatile,10 and the largest house price declines have been in the most highly regulated markets. In a well-functioning market, the median priced houses should be affordable to middle-income households, as they were in virtually all markets before the inception of more restrictive land use policies, especially urban containment. Only a few markets had adopted such policies by the 1970s, with many more to follow (see Appendix: Urban Containment). As late as about 1990 national price-to-income ratios were “affordable,” at 3.0 or less in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States (Figure 2).