Housing Affordability in Metropolitan Areas. The Application of a Combination of the Ratio Income and Residual Income Approaches to Two Case Studies in Sicily, Italy

Housing affordability problems have become more serious over the course of the last fewdecades and are now also affecting the middle-class, despite the fall in prices on the housingmarket. This study proposes a methodology to assess threshold-income as an index for measuringhousing affordability by applying a combination of the ratio income and residual incomeapproaches. The methodology is applied to two particular areas of Sicily in Italy as case studiesconsisting of medium-size metropolitan areas located in a less developed European region. Theareas have been chosen on the basis of their different territorial structure: a polarized area thatcomprises a high-density city centre and a polynuclear urban region. The results are diversified forincome level, as well as for town and urban zone, and allow us to compare the housingaffordability problems between towns belonging to the same metropolitan area.