Housing in Slovakia: Who, where and how can afford it?

Project description:  

The project examines worsening housing affordability in Slovakia in the context of the EU Affordable Housing Plan, which positions housing as central to social cohesion, economic resilience, and territorial balance. Despite growing EU-level attention, housing affordability in Central and Eastern Europe—particularly Slovakia—remains poorly understood in terms of its spatial variation, social impacts, and policy determinants. Addressing this gap, the project delivers an integrated, policy-relevant analysis aligned with EU objectives on affordability, inclusion, and sustainable urban development. 

The project employs a mixed-methods design combining quantitative and qualitative approaches. Quantitative analyses use fine-scale data on housing prices, incomes, housing supply, credit conditions, and taxation to construct and test multidimensional affordability indicators across regions and settlement types. These are complemented by representative survey data capturing subjective perceptions of affordability, housing quality, residential satisfaction, and housing-related insecurity. Qualitative methods further examine the housing pathways, lived experiences, and coping strategies of affordability-constrained households, revealing mechanisms not observable in aggregate data. 

Conceptually, the project treats housing affordability as a socio-economic, spatial, and institutional phenomenon. It integrates demand- and supply-side dynamics, urban and suburban development, tenure structures, and tax and housing policy frameworks, explicitly linking affordability to social inequality, labour mobility, and quality of life. By jointly analysing objective indicators and subjective experiences and connecting market dynamics with policy instruments, the project will provide robust evidence to inform socially just and spatially sensitive housing and tax policies in Slovakia, while contributing to broader European debates on affordability in ownership-oriented housing systems. 

Project aims:  

1. To propose and validate an innovative housing affordability measure for ownership-oriented housing markets, incorporating data source sensitivity and employing established and advanced indicators at sub-national and local scales, consistent with the objectives of the new European Affordable Housing Plan. 
2. To analyse spatial and social disparities in housing affordability, with particular attention to low-income households and vulnerable population groups.
3. To examine the relationship between housing affordability, housing quality, and selected dimensions of quality of life and socioeconomic status mobility.
4. To identify economic, spatial, and institutional factors influencing housing and rental prices in Slovakia.
5. To evaluate the role of suburbanisation and residential mobility in shaping housing affordability patterns and vice versa.
6. To compile and harmonise a comprehensive, spatially explicit database of housing-related data for Slovakia.
7. To forecast changes in property prices at a local level and assess potential impacts on affordability.
8. To evaluate differences in asking and transaction price data and assess their implications for affordability measurement.
9. To simulate the distributional effects of alternative property tax settings by linking housing outcomes with socio-economic characteristics of the population.
10. To develop a methodological framework supporting evidence-based property taxation and housing (support) policy design.
11. To critically assess existing housing policies in Slovakia in terms of their effectiveness in addressing housing unaffordability, inequalities and prevention of social deprivation and homelessness.
12. To reveal drivers of structural inequalities that exclude people from dignified housing by describing housing pathways of different households in vulnerable situations.
13. To identify forms of precarity, insecurity, stigma, and social exclusion experienced by households in vulnerable situations, and examine their survival strategies and responses.
14. To observe how ethnicity, particularly in the case of Roma communities, but not exclusively, affects access to housing.
15. To foster methodological and policy debate in the Slovak context on housing affordability research across different disciplines and workplaces.