Housing Affordability and Income-Threshold in Social Housing Policy

The issue of affordability housing has again become crucial in ensuring a greater social equity, to increase social cohesion and to reduce inequalities and exclusions within to metropolitan or regional systems which, in the current climate of severe economic crisis, have to respond to global challenges of development, innovation and sustainability.This study aims to build an information base that provides a systematic knowledge, on the territorial scale, of the level of affordability housing, by which to identify problems and to propose their resolution through traditional planning tools or through new practices involving some private entities and/or public administrations. The information basic consists of the analysis of the distribution of the wealth both in term of income and real estate market price, and of the calculation of the threshold-incomes (based on the affordability index) that filter the access to the real estate market. All these data constitute a system used to define the correspondences between the population and affordable housings, distinguishing them for location and for income groups. This approach is applied to the case study of the territorial system of the Province of Syracuse (Italy).