Housing affordability, quality of life, and residential satisfaction in the Austrian cross-border suburban region of Bratislava, Slovakia
Introduction:
With border controls in the EU being mostly history, cross-border consumer and commercial mobility increased over time, although cross-border residential suburbanization might still be a rarity in Europe at present. To mention a few, this list includes Luxembourg, Salzburg or the so-called Euro metropolis Lille-Kortrijk-Tournai at the French-Belgian border. The Slovak capital, Bratislava, borders two countries which formed a single country in the past. The Bratislava granularity pulls many economically active inhabitants behind its boundaries and those of Slovakia. The Bratislava region’s average annual GDP growth in recent decades was one of the most substantial across Europe. It is primarily affected by the city’s location within Slovakia and in transnational terms, as well as by other factors. This growth relates to migration to the city and its hinterland.
Housing affordability, quality of life, and residential satisfaction: A literature review
Housing affordability means, in general, the ability and possibility to live under adequate conditions with a certain quality. It is made possible by a positive household incomes-to expenditures ratio (including the cost of living), available housing stock, certainty on financial markets, etc. According to the UN Humans Settlement Programme an estimated 1.6 billion people live in inadequate housing conditions, without access to basic services or sanitation, and struggling to afford housing costs.” Housing conditions and quality differ across countries and regions. Some authors view housing affordability as a challenge for households and individuals when reviewing the total costs of current and potential future housing.
Area under study:
Farkas and Klobučník were among the first to delimitate the Bratislava hinterland in Austria. Their area consists of municipalities (Gemeinde) across three districts (Bezirke) bordering Bratislava – Bruck an der Leitha, Gänserndorf and Neusiedl am See – with at least 5% Slovak population.
Regarding the absence of reliable data on migration from and daily mobility to Bratislava from this area, the share of Slovaks is the most precise data on the spatial extent of Bratislava behind the state border, yet this might not be inevitably related to the Slovak capital’s suburbanization processes.
Housing becomes less affordable:
The Global Residential Cities Index by Knight Frank shows that property prices in Bratislava rose with higher intensity (in relative terms) than in Vienna. Both cities (especially Bratislava) recorded an extremely high increase after the initial Covid-19 breakout and the first worldwide economic lockdown in the spring of 2020. That strengthens the claim that properties close to Bratislava might be notably affected by suburbanization processes even in the cross-border region. Arguably, the housing affordability of “Slovak” municipalities in Austria would be influenced by the realty market in Bratislava.
Quality of life and satisfaction with living in the cross-border suburban area:
Next, we analyzed the strength of association of satisfaction assessment of living in a particular municipality and neighborhood with several environmental and social attributes of the residential environment as expressed by respondents from Hain burg an der Donau and Kittsee, using Kendall’s tau-b correlation coefficient.
Conclusions:
Housing affordability in the Austrian hinterland of Bratislava has recently stalled and in 2020, it dropped substantially. It was partially affected by lower wage growth. That affirms the questionnaire results by Falťan and Moravanská, who found that less than 2% of respondents (Kittsee incomers) were looking for financially affordable housing in this location. The unprecedented increase in house prices in the corona-crisis period led to a further deterioration of the property and housing market.
Quality of life is interlinked with housing affordability, as housing affordability influences the perceived quality of life. Simultaneously, the prerequisites for a satisfactory residential environment that, to an extent, influence the perception of subjective quality of life, impact housing affordability.