Despite the significant presence in other disciplines, ethics remains a topic that is under-explored in a housing context. This paper posits the implications of employing a framework of housing ethics, demarcating ethics from a notion of politics. The central contention: that housing ethics already exist and structure housing systems and approaches, as evidenced in three examples from policy, theory and philosophy. This framework, with an outlined two-part grammar, illuminates the importance of descriptive claims behind the normative context that is of great interest to housing studies. Therefore, the argument presented does not just valorise the framework of housing ethics but too the necessity of philosophical engagement in the assumptions underpinning housing research, namely any foundational claims on the phenomenon of housing and the human relationship to it.

This article critically reviews international literature on the social aspects of vertical living. It identifies three research approaches – the built environment effect, the differentiated built environment effect, and the human-environment interrelation – and two focal social orientations of research – suitability and experience – as well as four spatial orientations – space, design, verticality and volume, and technology. The article emphasises the need to extend the scope of future research beyond the building to the residential complex, clusters of complexes, and the entire city in order to better understand relations between volume and experience. It also calls for a more complex investigation of the vertical dwelling experience that would include residential aspirations, new neighbourly roles, and identities.

Social mix policies aim to integrate residents living in diverse forms of housing. While numerous studies have showcased the limitations of social mix in achieving this objective, explanations for this tendency remain incomplete. Accordingly, this qualitative case study adopts insights from the sociology of everyday life and interaction ritual theory to elaborate on academic understandings of (non)-interaction between disparate groups in mixed housing communities. It draws primarily from observational fieldwork and semi-structured interview data gathered in the public spaces of a transitioning mid-sized city in Ontario, Canada. The findings report how everyday encounters among and between the urban poor and wealthier residents (re)produce patterns of group solidarity and conflict. The continued application of micro-sociological perspectives to housing mix research can chronicle and perhaps mend the gaps between government housing policy objectives and the experiences of residents living within relevant legislative jurisdictions.

Hedonic modelling is an empirical analysis technique that is widely used to review the housing market and unpack the main determinants of price. A correct determination of housing price drivers allows a weighted prediction of the value of each dwelling for sale or rent. This paper reviews the fundamental determinants of housing prices that have been published in the literature to see which ones have a better predictive fit for the case of the housing market in the city of Santiago, Chile. From a record of 456,000 property transactions, a dataset composed of 11 explanatory variables is elaborated. Through a semi-logarithmic regression, 4 variables that contribute to explaining the formation of housing prices in Santiago, Chile, are identified. The results indicate that the socioeconomic characterisation of urban areas where housing is traded, the price of copper on the London Metal Exchange, the mortgage interest rate, the age of residential buildings are the main drivers for the main drivers of prices in Santiago. Given the crisis of access to housing in Chile, the article provides relevant information for decision-makers in housing policy.

This paper studies the gender inequalities in university-provided student accommodation in Babolsar, Iran, in relation to the role of the dominant political power and its approach in shaping the physical form of public dormitories and the living conditions of students. Secondary data analysis based on a questionnaire survey is utilised, and the results show that in numerous physical and non-physical ways women’s public dormitories are designed and controlled in favour of the dominant political power and against the wishes of their residents. This research examines how the ideological and cultural background permeates institutional practices in housing and affects the living conditions of a disadvantaged social group, which can open a discussion on the role of housing in social exclusion.

Holiday lets and holiday rentals have generated a major debate in recent years in Spain with regard to their regulation. Their impact, not only on tourism, but also on urban sustainability and local planning, have led to public intervention to control their expansion. This article analyses the origin of holiday lets, their problems, and how the public authorities have intervened in this regard, thus providing an overview of the impact of this type of accommodation in Spain.

Prior to the onset of the pandemic, evidence on the conversion of regular rental housing into permanent holiday homes has fuelled concerns that Airbnb and other short-term rentals contribute to the shortage of affordable homes and to the displacement of regular residents in cities with high housing demand. When the pandemic set in, the media was quick to speculate that holiday homes would be returned to the regular rental market. This paper provides some theoretical reflections on the factors that are driving and impeding such a development and presents preliminary results from an ongoing research project that empirically traces the impacts of COVID-19 on the rental housing market based on an analysis of real estate listings in four large Austrian cities. We argue that a current shift to the regular rental market is likely, but that the medium- and long-term development is uncertain. Empirically, we demonstrate that such a shift has occurred in all four cities considered. We do not find evidence, however, that the increased rental housing supply has dampened rent levels.

This article identifies the spatial correlation between the social determinants of health in the housing area (housing prices, overcrowding, poor-quality building materials, and household socioeconomic vulnerability) and the spread of COVID-19 in Santiago de Chile. The research used data from the 2017 Census conducted by the National Institute of Statistics of Chile and data on confirmed cases of COVID-19 (PCR) by communes provided by/obtained from Chile’s Ministry of Health. The article provides a two-fold examination/analysis of the spatial correlation using the Pearson measure to observe how the virus spread from areas with high-quality housing in the early stage of the contagion to then become concentrated in areas with low-quality of housing. The second examination/analysis is a multiple linear regression to identify the housing factors that inform virus propagation. The test results show that of the four social determinants of health relating to housing assessed here, housing prices is the variable that best predicts how the social determinants of health based on housing explain the progress of the pandemic for the Santiago case, following the collinearity factors according to the data used in this study. The conclusions suggest that public policy should treat housing quality as a factor in public health and health risks that needs to be addressed with a transdisciplinary approach to urban planning in Chile.

This paper describes the post-disaster reconstruction in the Tohoku region after the 2011 earthquake. Nine years have passed since the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami occurred, and many efforts have been made since to rebuild the devastated territories. Some Japanese architects and urban planners have seen the recovery as a window of opportunity to aim for more resilient cities. Nevertheless, building disaster-resilient communities remains a challenging task. This short paper presents the initiatives made to improve refugees’ social conditions in disaster-relief housing, using the case study of Iwanuma’s relocation project. Concluding remarks suggest that many efforts have been made to improve the social aspect of disaster-relief housing in Japan, for example through the development of community spaces or the pursuit of friendlier dwellings.

Historically, public and affordable housing has been provided by the state in close conjunction with local authorities, public housing developers, and other social housing providers. Yet, affordable rental homes are now increasingly being managed, produced, or acquired by private equity firms and other institutional investors. In this contribution, we argue that ‘financialised privatisation’ is a helpful concept for understanding these shifts in state-finance compromises within the post-crisis affordable housing sector. Drawing on the case of England, we first discuss the major mechanisms of financialised privatisation and examine how an increasingly polymorphous affordable housing sector has emerged with a focus on multi-tenure and mixed-income housing tenures. We then discuss the possible challenges of this transformation and conclude that it remains very much a question whether a privately funded housing system will emerge that provides genuinely affordable housing and reduces inequalities.

North to south migration in the U.S. and housing developers’ claims of benefits led to exponential growth in neighbourhood homeowners associations during recent decades. Sanctioned by state laws, association rules governing homeowners are usually initiated by developers who claim that the rules protect property values. But the claim is not supported by empirical analysis. Inflation adjusted annual percentage returns in consecutive sales of a sample of 900 most recent home sales in Duval County Florida, Pima County Arizona and St. Louis County Missouri during late 2017 and early-2018 were examined. The results revealed that the annual percentage returns on homes sold in homeowners associations were significantly less than those of homes in other neighbourhoods statistically controlling for property characteristics and prevailing economic conditions at the time of the original purchase. Correlates of home prices at any point in time are not predictive of percentage return from purchase to sale.