Affordability for Whom? Introducing an Inclusive Affordability Measure

This content was first published by the Terner Center at UC Berkeley on May 2nd, 2024.

This paper presents a new approach to measuring housing affordability—one that seeks to provide a better indicator of what counties in California are affordable, and for whom. The authors propose a new inclusive measure that considers whether a location is affordable not to those who live there, but rather to those who might potentially live there. The authors begin by explaining the problems with the way current affordability measures are constructed, and detail how we address those problems in our alternative inclusive affordability measure.

The paper is paired with Affordability for Whom?—a web-based interactive tool that enables detailed examination of how this measure impacts affordability at the county level.

^^ Click to reach the interactive website