Empirical Perspectives on Residential Quality and Housing Preferences

The major focus of existing bodies of literature has been the explanation of the specific housing characteristics, tenure, location and prices associated with the socioeconomic peculiarities of individuals and groups within the urban setting. In doing these, attempts are not directly focused on the complexity of housing choice decision-making process engendered by the intricate polarization of urban residential markets but on understudying the relation between personality and domiciles. Of course, housing choice in a polarized residential market is a complex decision-making process involving two interrelated perceptive issues: quality of home and affordability both of which are underlined by household socioeconomic peculiarities. Residential quality splits into structural and neighborhood-location attributes of dwellings, while housing affordability splits into economic status of home renters and the prevailing prices of property within the housing submarkets. However, for the purpose of simplification, review of empirical studies involving housing preferences in this book is pursued along three broad perspectives: urban market segmentation or polarization, environmental attachment and housing preferences, residential quality, socioeconomic dynamics and housing preferences and empirical modeling of housing preferences.