Housing Statistics in the European Union 2004

Housing Statistics in the European Union 2004



Description

At the fifteenth informal meeting of EU housing ministers in Padua in November 2003, the Czech Republic and Sweden offered to prepare “Housing Statistics in the European Union 2004”. This report is the tenth edition in a series of publications dating back to 1991. The aim of the report is to provide readers with interesting and comparable data on economic, social and demographic aspects of housing. In the series of publications, the 2004 edition is the first to include data on housing in the ten new Member States. Another new feature of the 2004 edition is the chapter describing different government policies in the field of housing.
The report is made up of five chapters covering a wide range of topics related to housing policy.

* Chapter 1 presents a range of general data on the demographic and socio-economic context for housing.
* Chapter 2 deals with the quality of the housing stock, concentrating on the average useful floor area, amenities and age of the housing stock.
* Chapter 3 is devoted to the availability of housing, including the distribution of different types of housing by tenure.
* Chapter 4 looks at the affordability of housing and illustrates the weight of housing in household budgets; the different indices which offer an overview of the changes in the cost of housing; and trends in mortgage lending.
* Chapter 5 focuses on the role of government and of state intervention in the housing market, paying particular attention to public expenditure on housing and to the existence and characteristics of social housing.