Housing And Poverty Essay

Housing forms one of the basic needs of human. Maslow’s Theory Hierarchy of Needs sees that housing forms the foremost important needs, in addition to security, food and others, at the lowest among the five levels, however public concern over the affordability of housing arises from two factors. First, housing is the single largest expenditure item in the budgets of most families and individuals. Poverty and low incomes prevent people from accessing potential housing options, and make others hard to sustain. This evidence review explores how housing can mitigate or exacerbate the impact of poverty on people 's lives.

There are a number of factors which have driven up the demand for housing, and in particular for home ownership, in recent years.

This evidence review explores how housing can mitigate or exacerbate the impact of poverty on people 's lives.

Evidence that poverty affects housing circumstances is generally stronger than evidence that housing circumstances affect poverty. Low incomes prevent access to many potential housing options, or make them hard to sustain. However, the housing system, with social housing, housing benefit and support for homeless people, acts as a buffer against the effects of poverty, so that although people living in poverty have a higher risk of bad housing conditions, they generally avoid them.

The average household devotes roughly one quarter of income to housing expenditures, while poor and near-poor households commonly devote half of their incomes to housing. These high proportions suggest that small percentage changes in housing prices and rents will have large impacts on non housing consumption and household

For example, the rapid rise in the price of homes clearly made homeownership more difficult for many renters, but it also greatly reduced the financial costs of homeownership to a much larger group of existing homeowners by providing substantial capital gains. Among renters, the large share of income devoted to housing surely reflects voluntary consumption choices for many households and the consumption of a publicly determined minimum quality and quantity of housing for others. To the extent that the latter group of households would choose a lower quality of housing, given their opportunities, one might conclude that the incomes of the poorest households are insufficient to afford the socially imposed minimum