A "quality-based" measure of housing affordability problems employing the cost of housing just meeting adequacy standards is proposed as an improvement over the conventional "high" rent-to-income criterion. Based on "Annual Housing Survey" data, affordability difficulties grew between 1975 and 1983 by either measure. The conventional measure, however, overestimated the extent of quality-based affordability difficulty for renters by 20% in 1975 and 24% in 1983 based upon Section 8 housing quality standards. In addition, 35% of rental households with an affordability problem by the conventional measure did not have an affordability problem by the quality-based measure, while 19 to 23% of rental households found to have an affordability problem by the quality-based measure were not so classified using the conventional measure. Copyright American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.

This paper examines rural and urban changes in the distribution of poverty that would result from modifying the conventional poverty measure to include the annuity value of household net worth. Use of this new income/wealth measure caused numerous shifts in the location and demography of the poverty population. Among those more often found to be in poverty under the new measure were young, renter, and large central city resident households. Age, homeownership, farm employment, education, retirement status, public assistance participation, and residence in the West were important factors in explaining the divergence of the WH and INC measures. The age and retirement impacts were significantly different in rural and urban areas. Rural residence itself was not an important factor in explaining WH and INC differences.

Imputed income from owner-occupied housing is generally not included in analyses of the distribution of income. Yet the value of homeownership is undoubtedly an important element distinguishing the economic status of one family from another. In this paper, using a new method to decompose income inequality by income source, we analyze the impact of potential income derived from the net worth of housing on a representative national sample of US homeowners. Using 1980 Survey of Residential Finance data, we find that housing income adds less to inequality per dollar of income than does income from all other sources.