Providing the means of a better knowledge of housing affordability is becoming increasingly important, for public policies and scholarly research. This data paper presents and describes a consolidated, harmonized, internationally comparable database to quantify the impacts of the housing affordability crisis. This database is structured to promote some means to understand key issues in urban areas: social filtering processes, gentrification, accumulation, and socio-economic inequalities more generally. We do so by discussing a methodological framework to integrate neighborhood and local spatial data, structured with harmonized indicators, to examine and compare the unequal spatial patterns of housing affordability across Europe.

The dataset derives from the ESPON Big Data for Territorial Analysis of Housing Dynamics 2018-19 applied for research program. ESPON EGTC is a regional planning agency for the European Commission. In European larger cities, decent and affordable housing is increasingly hard to get access: the goal of the study is to inform the increased and unequal affordability gap at the local geographical level, with tools for comparison between cities, and within cities.