International Housing Affordability Survey

Nothing in the world today affects citizens more directly than the home in which they live. And when it comes to housing no piece of recent research opens more interesting avenues of investigation than the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey. This combination of goals sets up some inherent conflicts in every society. What is good for a given individual or family is not necessarily good for a society as a whole, and what is good for society as a whole is not necessarily good for any given individual or family. From this fundamental tension has sprung a bewildering set of arrangements for allocating and regulating land and residential structures on it. At one end of the political spectrum have been societies in which land is owned in common and is supposed to be allocated to individuals and families on the basis of merit or need.

Such has been the case with many Utopian and Socialist societies. At the other end of the spectrum have been societies where the individual ownership of land and homes is considered a bedrock condition of a democratic society, where ownership is widely dispersed, and individual rights and preferences have been zealously safeguarded from all but the most necessary intervention. One of the best examples of this would have been the United States, Canada or Australia in the nineteenth century. The trend over the last fifty years has been a convergence toward the middle of this spectrum as Socialist countries have abandoned the dream of complete common ownership and societies that traditionally were loath to interfere with individual property rights have adopted layer after layer of regulation intended to secure the health, safety and wellbeing of the larger society.