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| Housing Affordability Index× | Accessibility Analysis× | |
|---|---|---|
| Field≠ | Urban Studies | Human Geography |
| Family | Process / pipeline | Process / pipeline |
| Year of origin≠ | 2006 | 1959 |
| Originator≠ | Housing-economics tradition (ratio measures); Michael E. Stone (residual-income approach) | Walter G. Hansen |
| Type≠ | Index/ratio comparing housing cost to household income | Spatial index of the ease of reaching opportunities from a location |
| Seminal source≠ | Stone, M. E. (2006). What is housing affordability? The case for the residual income approach. Housing Policy Debate, 17(1), 151–184. DOI ↗ | Hansen, W. G. (1959). How accessibility shapes land use. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 25(2), 73–76. DOI ↗ |
| Aliases | Median Multiple, Housing Cost Burden Ratio, Residual Income Affordability, NAR Housing Affordability Index | Hansen Accessibility, Gravity Accessibility Measure, Potential Accessibility, Spatial Accessibility Index |
| Related | 4 | 4 |
| Summary≠ | A housing affordability index summarises how the cost of housing in a city or market relates to what households can pay, condensing prices, rents and incomes into a single interpretable number. The simplest forms are ratios — the median house price divided by median income, or housing outlays as a share of income — while the residual-income approach championed by Michael Stone instead asks what is left for everything else after housing is paid. Together these measures let analysts compare affordability across places and over time, flag cost-burdened populations, and track housing stress as markets shift. | Accessibility analysis measures how easily opportunities — jobs, shops, clinics, parks — can be reached from a given location, combining the attractiveness (size) of destinations with the cost of travelling to them. The gravity-based formulation introduced by Walter Hansen in 1959 sums the opportunities at all destinations, each discounted by a distance-decay function of travel cost, producing a single accessibility score per origin that has become a foundational concept in transport geography and urban planning. |
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