A Comparative Analysis of the Housing Affordability in Romania and the European Union from the Perspective of the Housing Costs

Abstract

The accessibility of housing is one of the challenges to which the global economy, and implicitly, the European economy, must respond from the perspective of ensuring sustainable socio-economic development of contemporary society.This challenge is the result of problems whose manifestation has been accentuated in the last decades: increasing the rate of housing deprivation, limiting the access to housing for some social categories, emphasizing social exclusion and segregation.This study aims to identify, after a comparative analysis of the indicators associated with housing costs in the European Union and Romania, the main problems facing our country, as a state of the European Union, from the perspective of housing affordability.The research focuses on the study of housing conditions and the aspects that define the housing affordability in Romania and the European Union. Romania has a housing stock dominated by houses (70.3% of homes built before 1980), but which is not burdened by major deficiencies (regarding the number of homes, number of rooms, living space).The deficiencies of housing in Romania are related to overcrowding and severe housing deprivation. In terms of housing costs, the research showed a high degree of burden on Romanian households with housing costs, among the highest in the EU, seven out of ten households feel the financial burden of housing costs and only 6% of households are not affected. Data provided by Eurostat for the period 2010-2018 were used for the analysis.