Housing affordability during the urban transition in Spain

Juan Carmona Pidal, Markus Lampe and Joan Rosés

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: During the decades previous to the Civil War, Spain experienced a rapid process of urbanization, which was accompanied by the demographic transition and sizeable rural-urban migrations. This article investigates how urban housing markets reacted to these far-reaching changes that increased demand for dwellings. To this end, we employ a new hedonic index of real housing prices and construct a crossregional panel dataset of rents and housing price fundamentals. This new evidence indicates that rents were not a significant financial burden on low-income families and, hence, housing was affordable for working classes. Also, we show that families’ access to new homes was facilitated by a sizable growth of housing supply. Substantial investments in urban infrastructure and the institutional framework enabled the construction of new homes at affordable prices. Our results suggest that housing problems were not pervasive during the urban transition as the literature often seems to claim.

Keywords: Demand and Supply of Housing; Regulation in Housing Markets; urban growth. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N93 N94 R30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2014-09
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/60556/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Housing affordability during the urban transition in Spain (2017)
Working Paper: Housing affordability during the urban transition in Spain (2017)
Working Paper: Housing affordability during the urban transition in Spain (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:60556

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().